


Revenant

by stele3



Series: The Revenant 'Verse [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ableism, Bisexuality, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Dehumanization, Dubious Consent, Hostage Situations, M/M, Mind Control, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Panic Attacks, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Movie(s), Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Torture, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-01-21 03:46:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 73,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1536380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-movie AU in which Bucky didn’t just leave Steve on a river bank...he took him.</p><p> </p><p>Many thanks to rennemiles and sansets for beta-reading this and being willing to talk at length with my incoherent ass. I will be posting a chapter a week.</p><p>Warnings are in the beginning of each chapter, with more detailed descriptions of potential triggers in the notes at the end of each chapter. If anyone spots anything else in the fic that I should have tagged for but did not, please do not hesitate to tell me. At times there is dialogue in Russian--translation in hovertext.</p><p>ETA: this work has been translated into Chinese by cindyfxx and can be read here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2140611/chapters/4676136. ETA2: And fanart + Chapter covers by cindyfxx's friend juefeifeifei.tumblr.com!</p><p>ETA3: Translation into Russian here:  http://archiveofourown.org/works/4956481</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Zjawa (Revenant)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5681524) by [Ewka_LoL](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ewka_LoL/pseuds/Ewka_LoL)



If Steve had dreams while frozen in the ice, he doesn’t remember them.

Now his head is full of flashing lights and snatches of memories colored with the illogic of the subconscious: he’s in the trenches with the Howling Commandos, except it’s Sam and Natasha and Tony and Bruce wearing the Commando uniforms and a jumble of Nazis and Chitauri charging their position. Steve is snapping out orders, telling Tony to watch his six dammit, but something in his chest feels warm and alive like it hasn’t been since the ice thawed.

Then he looks up and the Winter Soldier closes his hand around Steve’s throat, lifts him bodily up out of the trench like a ragdoll.

After that the dreams get more fragmented. He’s back on the Charlie target and he doesn’t get the chip in place in time, and everyone he knows dies all over again. He’s in some kind of forest and everything hurts. He’s in New York after the Chitauri attack, the ground crumbling and exploding under him and he falls into a crack in the Earth that’s full of ice. He’s shivering. He’s on a bed. Snowflakes fall on his face and evaporate instantly, going from ice to gas. His left arm is frozen in place. He’s on a bed.

Well, more of a cot, really, the sort of thing that Sam would have found comfortable. The ceiling above him is white plaster, cracked and stained with water damage. Steve turns his head and feels the tug of stitches in his cheek, the grind of broken bones still knitting themselves back together.

Bucky’s crouched with his back against the far wall.

The uniform is gone—he wears jeans and the kind of olive-drab jacket that SHIELD mechanics sport—and he’s got the start of a beard. A plain, dark baseball hat covers his hair. It is, Steve realizes, Bucky’s version of Natasha’s civilian disguise for him, minus the eyeglasses.

When he sees Steve looking Bucky pushes up from the wall. If he’s still feeling his injuries from the carrier crash, he doesn’t show it. Crossing the room to Steve’s cot, he reaches out with the metal arm and grasps Steve’s right shoulder. The room goes spotty and dark and then Steve’s on his side at the edge of the cot.

His left arm hangs over the side. A manacle, similar to the one SHIELD—or Hydra, it’s hard to keep straight in his head right now—had slapped on him in the van, is firmly attached to his forearm. The manacle’s attached to the bed and the bed is attached to the floor.

Bucky’s watching his face. He nods once, wordlessly, then rises in that same smooth, deadly way and goes out the door. The world outside is bright, stabbing pain into Steve’s eyes, but it’s only a brief flash before Bucky closes the door firmly behind him.

Steve slips back under.

-o-

The next time he wakes up his ribs still ache but he can move his head, and Bucky is back. The baseball cap’s still jammed down and his hair sticks out in funny ways around his ears.

“Y’need a haircut,” Steve slurs at him.

Bucky doesn’t smile.

Instead he unlocks the manacle and makes Steve get up, which is hell. Blood throbs against his skull and he gets sick on the floor. Bucky’s grip is insistent, though, tugging him outside into warm air and then to a vehicle of some kind. A minivan, Steve thinks. It’s called a minivan.

Bucky shoves him in to lie on the minivan’s bare, dirty floor. Steve gratefully passes back out.

-o-

He’s naked and Bucky is running his hands over Steve’s skin. The throb in his head has faded along with the dizziness, but Steve finds himself disoriented all over again by the situation.

He must make some kind of movement as he wakes, because Bucky lifts his head. He’s ditched the ballcap and his hair hangs in his face.

“Where’s your tracker?” Bucky asks.

“What?” Steve tries to sit up but Bucky’s metal palm slams into his sternum. Pain rockets through him and Steve gasps for oxygen as his lungs seize up.

“ _Where is your tracker_?” Bucky demands, biting out each word. “You can tell me or I can start cutting in the most likely places.”

Both of Steve’s hands are chained behind him. He twists to escape metal hand pinning him down, fighting for breath. The pressure eases up but he only gets one good breath in before he’s being flipped onto his front.

The white-hot pain of a knife blade traces across the back of his thigh, making him shout and kick out with his other leg. The metal hand is on his neck now, keeping his cheek pressed to the minivan’s dirty carpet.

“I don’t—have one,” he finally manages to get out.

The knife stops moving and after a moment he’s flipped over onto his back again. Steve moans, trying to curl up into a ball. Only the metal hand on his chest keeps him flat.

Above him, Bucky’s eyes are hard and narrow. “They never gave you a tracker?”

“Couldn’t,” Steve wheezes. “Bullets and trackers...my body pushes them out.”

Bucky studies his face. Steve half-expects to feel the knife again, but instead Bucky sits back, letting Steve curl in around his bruised chest the way he wants.

Something soft lands on him, covering his naked body. It’s a thick woolen blanket that smells faintly of dog. Steve draws his legs up, wincing at the pull in his gut. It feels like the bullet there has already wormed its way back out, which is probably the only reason that Bucky believes him.

Bucky.

Groggily Steve lifts his head. All of the seats have been removed from the minivan’s interior, leaving a big empty space littered with the remains of Steve’s uniform—it looks like Bucky cut it off of him, and Steve feels a pang of guilt for the poor museum—along with a carefully-folded pile of gear that it takes a moment for Steve to recognize as _Bucky’s_ uniform.

Bucky himself is seated against the back of the minivan. He’s not wearing his cap and in the weak sunlight filtering through the windows his hair has more red tones than Steve remembers. Or maybe that’s because it’s so much longer than Bucky’s ever worn it before.

It’s probably a strange thing to focus on at the moment. Especially considering that Bucky also has a gun in his hand and while it isn’t currently pointed at Steve’s head it’s definitely addressed to his general vicinity.

“Where are we?” Steve asks. He moves his jaw from side to side, cringing at the stretch of stitches. Who stitched him up?

There’s no response. He tries again, “What happened? I don’t remember anything past you—hitting me.”

“You fell.”

Steve blinks. Bucky’s voice is a lot lower than he remembers it. Of course, it’s been two years since he heard it...or seventy, depending on if they counted by the objective timeline or Steve’s own, fractured version. “Out of the helicarrier? That’s—that.” Steve tries to uncurl, sucking a breath in through his nose. He can taste blood in his mouth. The world is spinning very slightly, enough that he wants to hold still. “I shoulda died,” he manages to croak.

“There was water.”

Steve vaguely remembers the shock of hitting the river’s surface. At that height there wouldn’t be much difference between falling onto water versus solid earth, but apparently that slim distinction had bought him his life. Of course it’d also given him a helluva concussion and knocked most of his ribs loose, not to mention the fact that he should have _drowned_ —

Realization strikes. “You pulled me out?”

Bucky turns his head, peering out of the van’s window. “You have information that I need.”

“What information?”

Blue eyes, so familiar in their shape and color but not in their expression, fix on him. “You called me a name.”

Steve swallows, licks his lips, and breathes, “Bucky.”

There’s not even the flicker of a reaction. “What kind of name is ‘Bucky’?”

“It’s—it was a nickname. Your middle name’s Buchanan. James Buchanan Barnes, after—there was a president. You really don’t remember your name?”

That does get a tiny reaction, a crack in the blank stare. Bucky looks out the window again then snaps back around as Steve groans his way up into a sitting position, the blanket kindly coming along for the ride. From this new vantage point he can see out the windows: they’re in the parking lot of some kind of store, edged by trees. The store’s sign is written in Spanish.

Steve props himself against the back of the passenger seat and waits for the world to stop spinning. It feels like the cut on his thigh has already started to close up. Across from him, Bucky’s still got a firm grip on the gun and eyes him warily.

“You’re James Buchanan Barnes and you were born in—”

“Brooklyn,” Bucky says and Steve’s heart leaps before it crashes as Bucky goes on. “I went to that museum. I want to know what happened after that.”

Steve swallows, nods. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Not yet. Not here.”

Bucky gives him pants and dispassionately watches Steve struggle into them. He unlocks the manacles just long enough for Steve to put on a shirt. “You don’t have to do that,” Steve points out as Bucky roughly pulls his arms behind him again. “I’m not going anywhere. If I weren’t here, I’d be out there looking for you.”

The manacles snap into place, briefly pinching the delicate skin at Steve’s wrist. “Stay down or I’ll knock you unconscious again.”

He gets into the front and starts driving.

Ten minutes later Steve is braced against the back of the van, where he rolled to after the last hard swerve, with his feet planted on the wheel well. “Bucky,” he says desperately, “Bucky, maybe I should drive.”

Clearly whoever taught Bucky how to operate a motor vehicle were more interested in combat scenarios than stealth, safety, or sanity. In the rearview mirror Bucky’s hard gaze cut to him briefly— _no no, don’t take your eyes off the road_ —but he says nothing.

They head south, watching each other out of the corners of their eyes: Bucky with suspicion and Steve with a dazed kind of amazement. Over the long, bruising journey Steve manages to surmise that they’re somewhere in Honduras, winding through back country and avoiding the cities. How they’ve managed to get this far, he’s not sure. Either he was unconscious longer than he thought or Bucky stole a quinjet for part of the journey. He’d never had any pilot training but who knows what Hydra crammed into his mind?

Bucky doesn’t speak all day. He drives with a single-minded purpose and a clear destination in mind.

When they get there, that certainty shatters.

At dusk they reach a battered house in the hills, notable only for the number of satellite dishes perched on its roof. Bucky pulls up to the front, kills the engine, and spends five minutes staring at the house while the engine ticks. The windows of the house are dark, empty.

Eventually Bucky gets out, gun in hand, and eases up to the front door. Watching him disappear inside, Steve feels a horrible surge of panic and sets to dislocating his shoulder.

Having twisted his manacled arms around to his front, he scrambles out of the minivan and follows Bucky inside. The soldier in him immediately identifies this place as a safehouse: small windows with strategic sightlines to the road and the surrounding hillsides, reinforced walls, low cupboards full of supplies. It’s been vacated in a hurry. Gun cartridges and cans of food litter the floor, and in the corner there’s a half-burned pile of papers.

Bucky stands in the center of the front room, the gun hanging at his side. He doesn’t even startle when Steve busts in after him, just keeps turning his head from side to side. Easing around him, Steve checks the roach-infested kitchen, the two adjoining bedrooms, the disgusting toilet, before coming back out to face Bucky.

“Is this where you were supposed to go?” he asks. “If a mission failed?”

Bucky doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the papers on the floor but making no move to pick them up. There are dark circles under his eyes.

“Bucky,” Steve says gently. “You need to sleep.” They both do. The worst of Steve’s injuries have healed but he has the empty, exhausted feeling that means his metabolism needs a break. And a large meal, but one thing at a time. This run down little house, reeking of turned food and Hydra, wouldn’t be his first choice of lodgings; Steve doesn’t think they’ll find anything better and he’s suddenly very sure that Bucky hasn’t rested anytime in the recent past.

He steps a little closer and Bucky’s gaze snaps to him. Steve holds up his hands, displaying the manacles. “If I wanted to hurt you or even capture you, I could have done it on the helicarrier.”

“Why didn’t you?” Bucky asks. The determination—or programming—that got them here is gone and he is hunched, uncertain, peering out at Steve from under his ragged hair. He sounds so perplexed. Steve aches to just put one hand on his shoulder, anything kinder than the punches they’ve thrown into each other’s bodies, the damage they’ve done.

“You’re my friend,” he tells Bucky again, will tell him again and again. “And I know you don’t remember that right now, but I swear to God—I would never willingly do anything to hurt you.”

For a long moment Bucky visibly wrestles with himself then straightens, his mouth tightening. “If you try to run—”

“I won’t.”

“—if you try to run,” Bucky goes on, inflectionless. “I won’t kill you. I’ll find someone you care about and kill them.”

Steve goes cold. He means it; the person inside might be different but Steve still knows the way that Bucky’s face moves, knows his tells. Bucky absolutely means what he’s saying.

He thinks of Peggy in her hospital bed, Sam with his open heart and unreinforced front door. Natasha could handle herself, except then he remembers the steady gush of blood from her shoulder.

“I’m not going to run,” he says numbly.

Mollified, Bucky backs into a corner of the room not occupied by insects or ashes and sits down against the wall, ignoring Steve’s incredulous look. Steve is less inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth or turn down a free bed, and sacks out on the rickety cot in one of the back rooms.

-o-

Hours later Steve’s awakened by bitten-off whimpers from the front room and the sound of scrabbling. When he rolls off the cot he half-expects to find a Hydra team and Bucky in a shock collar; but there’s only Bucky, shoved into his corner, his heels pushing on the floor and his face screwed up in fear and pain.

“Bucky,” Steve says. “ _Bucky_.” There’s a gun clenched in Bucky’s right hand. Currently it’s pointed at the floor but Steve can’t see if the safety’s on. Bucky’s finger is on the trigger. Steve keeps his distance and tries to use his voice, murmuring a constant litany.

It takes way too long of Bucky looking agonized and scared before his eyes snap open. The gun comes up, zeroing on Steve’s head. He holds very, very still while the terror and confusion fades from Bucky’s expression.

They stay in those positions, Bucky backed into a corner with his legs drawn up and Steve kneeling on the floor, until slowly the gun lowers.

 

\--------

 

Bucky. His name is Bucky.

What a weird frigging name.

Not that he has all that much to compare it to. And maybe it fits, that weird name. He finds himself responding to it despite hearing it for the first time only four days ago. (Five.) (Five?) Four or five days ago. In the—before that, he heard other people call him “the asset.” That fits, too: it’s what he is, there is nothing more, it is not important.

Steve calls him Bucky, though, and he—he does not trust Steve, but he doesn't think that Steve would lie to him. And even if he did, Bucky would know. Four (or five) days spent in his company has already taught Bucky that Steve is a terrible liar.

So, his name is Bucky.

A weird name for a weird subject. Anatomically there is no major difference between him and other people except the arm; he has a head, a torso, a face. Put on a long-sleeved jacket and the dirty mitten that he spotted on the side of the road. (It is small, pink, and right-handed. He forces it on over his metal fingers anyway.) Dressed that way, he can pass for human. No one will look at his body and scream. (Some people have, before. He can't remember who or why, but he knows it happened.)

They leave the safehouse behind and Steve asks again to drive. “If you’re trying not to attract attention it might be a better idea to—”

Bucky calculates with the intel he has—Steve has had multiple chances to attack or attempt escape and has not; he is unarmed while Bucky has a round in the chamber; he knows Bucky's name; he is… _important_ —and reaches over wordlessly to unlock the manacles.

Then he sits back in the passenger seat and keeps his finger curled on the trigger of his sidearm.

They head into the city. It is a risk. A city means eyes, both digital and human; he is still not certain how much ground they have on their pursuers. And he is not meant to exist among people. Someone may look at him and see through the jacket and cap and dirty pink mitten. See all the empty places in him, the things he cannot remember and the things he wishes he could forget.

Steve gets food.

There is a roadside vendor selling things that he doesn't know the name of. Steve buys a lot. He brings it all back to the van and hands a paper plate full of greasy, savory-smelling...things to Bucky. 

“You need to eat,” he tells Bucky.

He does that a lot. Tells Bucky to sleep, to let him drive, to eat...except they aren’t orders, exactly. More like instructions. Helpful ones. Admittedly the sleep idea hadn’t gone so well—he’d seen things, gone places and gotten lost and there had been people he knew he’d already killed even if he couldn’t remember their names—but his stomach just gave a loud gurgle of approval, so he takes a tentative bite.

The burst of flavor across his tongue is unexpected and almost shocking in its intensity. Bucky chews, swallows, and takes another, bigger bite. It feels like each individual cell in his body is opening up to suck nutrients out of the food. He eats all three of the things on his plate then sits in the open sliding door of the minivan watching as Steve buys another plate for them both.

As they eat he periodically catches Steve looking at him. It’s always with that same stunned fascination, like Bucky’s done something amazing in the last five seconds that he can’t remember.

When Bucky catches him staring for the fourth time, Steve ducks his head. The skin of his neck flushes. “Sorry, sorry. I just—can’t really believe you’re here. You’re actually alive.”

Is he? He has a name. He sleeps and eats. He has Steve, who he should have killed already. He might yet do it. Steve clearly doesn't want to hurt him, but his associates may not share that weakness.

He will learn as much as he can from Steve and then he will—he will—

"Bucky?"

Steve's voice jerks him out of his head. He is sitting hunched over his food, staring at the ground. His eyes burn. He forces himself to blink. Bucky is not very good at acting like a person; they did not think it was important, so what he knows is only what he has observed on his own. He waits three seconds then blinks again.

Steve is watching him. Steve does not look like he's counting out the proper intervals between blinks.

Steve asks, “How much do you remember?”

Then, “Do you remember _anything_?”

Then, “Okay. Okay. We’ll work it out.”

Bucky’s fingers curl on the edges of his paper plate, crumpling it. The thought rises up in his mind, not for the first time, that Steve is wrong and Bucky isn’t who Steve thinks he is. The idea closes his throat, turns his palms slick. If Steve is wrong then—then Bucky doesn’t know what else there is. He has a name now. If it isn’t actually his then he has nothing and the asset will go back in the chair to be scrubbed down to a bloodless stump, a thing that barely thinks, barely exists.

No. No, not that. Even if he isn’t who Steve Rogers thinks he is, he will find out how to act like that person until Steve believes he is.

He cannot go back.

Steve takes the half-crumpled paper plate out of his hands and stacks it on top of his own before carrying them over to a dented garbage can on the street. Watching him, Bucky is struck all over again at the easy way he moves. He is used to people who run, cower, or attack, not walk steadily across a dirty street, turning his head to watch some kids play a soccer game in a nearby field, rolling the shoulder that Bucky shot as if it hasn’t quite healed all the way yet.

Steve, he knows, is different from other people. Bucky has killed enough human beings to know when they should go down and four bullets is three more than typical. Yet despite his body, Steve is still very _human_ in a way that goes beyond biology. He exists inside himself effortlessly.

Rising, Bucky tries to roll his shoulders the same way, hold himself like a person instead of a weapon. Steve isn’t the only one Bucky has to convince: they need to find a way across the ocean, and that means passing under both human and digital eyes.

By the time he returns Steve has obviously cottoned onto what Bucky’s doing. There’s something like amusement in his expression, but tempered with enough affection that Bucky doesn’t want to smash his face into the pavement. Instead he watches the swing of Steve’s arms as he walks, the way he looks but doesn’t stare.

Maybe—maybe Bucky can learn more from Steve than just his own name.

 

\--------

 

They get on a train heading for the coast. They are moving fast, trying to leave as small a trail behind them as possible. Steve isn’t sure what travel plan Bucky is following, if their destination is another Hydra safehouse. Bucky could be leading him back to his masters for all Steve knows, Captain America turned into the most docile prisoner of war.

It doesn’t matter. Steve will follow him anywhere.

Back among people, Bucky goes tense and silent, his baseball cap pulled low and his eyes darting among the other passengers. Watching him watch them, Steve catalogues the differences between the man he knew and the one sitting beside him. The profile is the same, though the curved mouth turns down at the ends instead of forever quirking with some inner mischief. He doesn’t show much emotion at all, so different from the expressive face that Steve knows and grew up with. He’s bulkier, not just in the left shoulder: they are not quite of a size, Steve still has a few inches on him height-wise, but Bucky has put on muscle mass far beyond what he wore in the Howling Commandos.

He knows that when Bucky was a kid he lost his front baby teeth on the top and the bottom at the same time so his mouth looked like a square hole, but he doesn’t know what Hydra did to him, how they changed his body and mind into what it’s become.

Beside him, Bucky’s tension abruptly rackets up a few notches. Steve sees it half a second later: two local police officers are moving down through the train. They’re clearly not on any pressing mission, chatting in Spanish as they go and pausing to officiously nudge people’s bags out of the aisle.

Bucky shifts, one hand dipping towards his jacket. “Bucky,” Steve hisses.

The officers keep coming. Bucky cuts him a quick look, hard and flat, and subtly screws the soles of his boots against the train floor, setting their traction. Steve swallows, his mind racing.

A memory catches at him. Before he can think about it too much Steve lifts his arm and drapes it over Bucky’s shoulders, pulling him into Steve’s body. Instantly his wrist is being bent back hard enough that something cracks. Steve grits his teeth together and tries not to let any other reaction show.

The whites of Bucky’s eyes are visible. Looking into them, Steve mumbles, “Public displays of affection make people uncomfortable,” before he leans in and kisses Bucky.

The tension doesn’t immediately leave Bucky, but after a moment he does relax his grip on Steve’s hand. He doesn’t let go all the way, which is probably good for the image they’re trying to present: two men kissing on a public train.

Privately Steve can’t imagine anything more uncomfortable. He knows things have changed, that the world is more willing to accept this sort of thing, but all that means is that the two police officers will hopefully avert their eyes instead of arresting them.

It’s not the strangest or even the most embarrassing thing that Steve’s ever done to evade capture. Once in Hamburg they all had to wear ladies’ wigs. Nothing else, just the wigs, but that was worth a few months of ribbing. And anyway, it’d be silly for him to be willing to do this with Natasha but not with Bucky. The point isn’t the kiss, the point is the two police officers currently passing them.

It’s not even that much of a kiss, though Steve doesn’t have much to compare it to. Bucky’s lips are dry and warm against his. Neither of them moves their mouths but the bill of Bucky’s cap hides most of their faces, so it’s not like anyone’s going to grade them on technique.

Once the police officers have safely moved down the train Steve slowly pulls back. Their lips part with a soft, wet sound. Bucky’s eyes blink open—did he actually close them?—and he stares at Steve.

Sitting back in the bench seat, Steve keeps his arm around Bucky’s shoulders. He wants to; he can rationalize it—physical contact will keep up the illusion that they’re together—but the truth is he wants nothing more in the world than this, Bucky tucked safely underneath his arm, against his side.

His heart beats fast. His skin prickles. He fights the urge to lick his lips.

Bucky keeps looking at him. Steve feels vaguely like he should say something—apologize, maybe, or remind him about the time with the wigs. Bucky probably wouldn’t remember, though, and Steve doesn’t want to make him feel bad.

What he really wants to say is _I missed you so much and I know you don’t remember but when I woke up everyone else acted like you’d been gone for decades, and for me it was just a few days. That was the one thing I truly hated about this place—that you were just a sad story from way back when, and I’d seen you last_ week.

But that’s nothing new.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Please see notes at end for warnings about sexual content.

Bucky wakes up with his prick stiff between his legs.

He blinks down at where it’s tenting hopefully at the front of his pants. It hasn’t done that in—blank hole. No memory of it. Maybe never?

 _No,_ he thinks, letting his head fall back against the floor. _Not never_. He’s a man in his late twenties or early thirties; according to the memorial he read in Washington, he had a childhood, once, which presumably included puberty and—this.

It hasn’t done this since he’s been the Soldier, though. That, he’s almost certain about, in the way he is almost certain about anything. The asset doesn’t need a functional prick, so they took that away: there were always pinpoint scabs on his skin, whether or not he remembered who put them there.

It’s been two weeks since they left DC, though, and all the scabs have closed up. Thus far the only signs of withdrawal have been nausea, some cramping, unsteady hands. But now—this.

His prick shows no signs of softening.

He’d been dreaming, he thinks. It’s hard to tell. Dreams and memories sometimes run together in ways that frustrate him. Reality proves elusive enough when he has to shuffle through the piles Hydra left in his head, but dreams weave between the stacks, sampling randomly from everything and serving up a jumbled hash.

Case in point: he’d been dreaming of a room, some kind of empty apartment he doesn’t remember having been in. The Captain— _Steve_ —had been in the room with him and he’d known that there were others, close by, the doctor and his buzzards readying to pick at his flesh with their needles. He’d been trying to keep Steve quiet, to warn him in hand signals.

Except then Steve had kissed him.

He’d kept changing in flashes, small and big; but his lips had stayed steady against Bucky’s, softly parted the way they’d been on the train. The floor had been a bed—cushions, there’d been couch cushions underneath their legs—and Steve had pushed him onto his back. It made too much noise and the doctor was close, tapping at the window with a scalpel, but Steve had only smiled before leaning down to kiss him again.

His prick twitches, making him gasp.

It isn’t going away and he needs to get up. Wake Steve, who is sleeping on the floor in the next room over, and question him some more about SHIELD and Hydra. It is kill or be killed now. No one ever told Bucky how Hydra dealt with traitors because no one ever needed to. If he were capable of fear he would be terrified.

The Winter Soldier does not experience fear. He has his mission, albeit one of his own device: the wholesale destruction of Hydra. It is the only way to ensure his own survival...and Steve’s.

If Bucky turns his head, he could see Steve’s feet in the doorway. There’s an actual bed but Bucky had refused to lie in it— _the asset does not lie on beds_ —so Steve had refused, too. The bed stands empty and they are both lying on the floor. Steve Rogers makes no sense.

Closing his eyes, Bucky tries to mentally shift his thoughts—but there isn’t much else inside his mind that isn’t Steve, and that leads right back around to the apartment and the cushions on the floor and Steve’s lips against his. Steve’s body above him. He can feel the ghost of it even now, chest and legs and hands touching his.

He doesn’t understand how these things can exist in his mind, but he had to be told his own name.

His only other memories are cold and hurt and blood and the taste of a rubber mouthguard on his tongue. The hum of the machine just before its metal conductors came down over his head and took the world away. Cold, cold, his own hand stuck to glass, skin raw where he’d tried to pull it back at the last second _before the cryofreeze locked his muscles in place_

_He is being pulled out, a shuddering infant to the world, his limbs heavy and his blood sluggish. The people hauling him out are not the people who put him in; the room he’s in is not the room that was. Was that real? Is this real?_

_They put him in a chair. The chair, he remembers. There is a needle that goes into his chest and whatever's in it makes his muscles jolt._

_“Do you know who you are?”_

_His voice will not come. It’s curled up inside of him. He doesn’t know what will emerge if he opens his mouth, if it will be human or animal or machine._

_Something touches his right arm and pain courses through him, just the briefest flash. He cringes, shrinking back in the chair then bolting upright again. He knows he does not want to lie back in this chair._

_“Response to pain stimulus, no verbal response.”_

_Another needle. He realizes that someone has taken hold of his left arm. He can’t feel it but they are turning the limb this way and that. It looks...wrong, somehow. Someone is saying_ corrosion _and_ upgrade.

_Another shock. An involuntary sound escapes his mouth._

_“Do you know who you are?”_

_“No,” he rasps. It sounds human. He is human...?_

_To his left, some kind of machine begins to whir._

_“Verbal response. He’s stabilized enough to proceed.”_

_They push him back in the chair, strap him in. The metal whir comes closer. He cannot turn his head but he sees it out of the corner of his eye: a huge metal saw. He chokes, struggling to stay silent. They roll the saw into place on its mount, its spinning blade poised over the blackened metal of his left arm, and then they lower it—_

He is curled on his side, his left arm hugged to his chest and his whole body curved around its alien metal weight. His heartbeat thrums in his ears. It feels as though the saw cut into his skull instead: even the burn of light against his closed eyelids is agonizing.

It takes him a while to notice that his prick has gone soft. He does not feel relieved.

 

\--------

 

In Morocco Steve brushes off his dusty French enough to ask the hostel manager for pencil and paper.

Spreading out his catch on the worn but clean carpet in their room, Steve begins to draw faces. It’s been a long time since he’s done portraiture—a long time since he’s drawn anything at all, really. The Strike team had kept him plenty busy and there hadn’t really been a subject that caught his eye.

There’d also been a hint of guilt about the idea of spending an afternoon sketching a potted flower in his neighbor’s window when he could be fighting, protecting people. The sketches didn’t serve any purpose: he could sell them, but they’d likely only fetch a price because they were the work of Captain America.

Now, with cheap computer paper and an eraserless pencil, he sets to flexing those muscles again. Literally: his hand starts cramping after only a few faces begin to take shape.

In the other room Bucky is doing exercises of a different kind. Steve can hear the hard exhale of his breath, the creak of the floor as he rolls onto his front and pounds out another set of pushups. At first Steve had tried to count but stopped after the second set of two hundred.

Steve draws Natasha and Sam with a tight stomach. He hopes they’re okay, they and Commander Hill. For a brief moment they’d been his, a team following his lead. He and Bucky have passed through a few places with televisions in the last week, but the news has focused on the main points; he knows that he himself is considered missing and possibly dead.

Apparently no one else is worth mentioning.

Once he’s done a truly ridiculous number of calisthenics, Bucky drifts into Steve’s space. He’s wearing a tank top, his hair pulled back into a ponytail; it’s a struggle not to look, to categorize the ways that his body is different now. Steve keeps his eyes on his work.

After a while Bucky says, “I know him.” He’s pointing at a rough sketch of Rumlow, included on a page of double agents. “He was in charge of transport.”

Steve pauses in the act of shading Maria Hill’s eyes. “Any of the others?”

Bucky sinks to a crouch, his fingers hovering over the page. A furrow draws itself between his eyes. He touches Rumlow and Rollins but ignores Sitwell. Steve slides a solo portrait of Pierce over and Bucky’s whole face goes slack, his hand pressing the edge of the page. “Bucky?” Steve asks, worried.

Underneath a sheen of sweat, Bucky’s skin has gone pale. He is breathing shortly, his mouth parted. His eyelids droop at half-mast, his gaze fixed on Pierce’s features. When Steve says his name again he doesn’t respond, so Steve moves slowly, leaning closer to cover the picture with his own palm.

The absence of Pierce’s face in his vision snaps Bucky out of his reverie. He lifts his eyes to Steve’s face. His expression is dazed, so Steve gently slides the picture away. Bucky’s still got his hand on it and the paper rips in two.

Steve finds himself hoping that Natasha got to Pierce during that last battle, and got him good.

Bucky moves away. Steve lets him go, turns back to the papers. “What about any of these people?” he asks, lifting a page that includes Fury and Maria Hill. When Bucky barely glances at it before shaking his head, Steve breathes out a sigh of relief.

“There were doctors,” Bucky says shortly.

“I—don’t think I met any doctors at SHIELD. Not well enough that I could draw—”

“There was one—a small man, with glasses. He was before SHIELD.”

The penny drops and Steve grabs for his pencil. He hadn’t gone that far back yet, thinking to start with current events and work from there. He should have known better than to approach this from a linear perspective.

Drawing fast, he sketches the balding head and jowls that he remembers. It’s a rough caricature more than a portrait, but Steve has too much distaste for his subject to try for realism.

When he shows it to Bucky, that distaste is mirrored. “Dr. Armin Zola,” Steve provides. “We met him in 1944. He worked for Hydra, was the personal physician to Johann Schmidt.”

“How—” Bucky cuts off, visibly struggling to put something into words. When he continues, it’s slow. “People...don’t usually live this long. That was 1944 and this is.”

He stops, uncertainty winning over. Steve has to think about it himself. “2014. We both got...changed. The US gave me the serum, and Zola did something else to you.”

Bucky stills. “What did he do?”

Alarm bells go off in Steve’s head. Everything about Bucky’s body language is suddenly very wrong. He looks like a spooked animal ready to snap. “I don’t know,” Steve answers slowly. “He didn’t have you for very long. I think—look, you heal fast. I dislocated your shoulder and it’s fine now, right? It’d have to be for you to do all those pushups.” Belatedly Steve wonders if it’s actually been hurting Bucky all this time and he’s just programmed not to notice. Then Bucky nods jerkily and Steve gives an internal sigh of relief. “You must have some kind of advanced healing factor. We were racing the Nazis pretty hard to find a recipe for super soldiers, maybe they gave you a different version of the serum.”

Bucky barely seems to have heard him. He’s staring down at the portraits scattered across the floor. “Was I— _different_ , after he had me? Did I act differently?”

“No, you were the same.”

Bucky's eyes sharpen, the same way they used to do when he was looking through the scope of his gun. “You're lying.”

Steve starts to protest, swear that he's not, when he realizes that yes, he is. He swallows once, hard, then says, “It's not...the way you were asking about. It wasn't a big...thing, I don't even know if it had anything to do with Zola—”

“What. Wasn't a big thing?” Steve’s not sure, but he thinks Bucky might be shaking.

Steve swallows again and says, “You kissed me.”

It feels like he's dragging the words up out of his own guts. They don't come easy: it goes against every instinct to loose them in the air, and the words that follow in their wake come much faster, easier. “You didn't mean it like that. You were drunk. It was a week after Zola's lab and Gabe had found a bottle of Scotch from somewhere. You drank most of it—I practically had to carry your sorry hide back to our tent. I think you'd have gotten fresh with a good-lookin' goat at that point.”

He tries to smile. Bucky's eyes drop to his mouth briefly then rise again. “I kissed you.”

“Yeah. Outside the tent. Nobody saw, it wasn't—you passed out right afterwards and the next day you said you didn't remember anything past 2300. Swore off Scotch for good.”

“Were we in love?”

It's probably the last thing that Steve expected. Bucky could have revealed that his brain was now a computer controlled by remote and Steve would have been less shocked. The very idea of it, of Bucky being in love with him or him being in love with Bucky, knocks into his lungs, makes him panic in a way that guns and helicarriers and the cold glint of a knife in Bucky's hand can't.

“No, of course not,” he says. “We were just friends.” It barely feels like he's speaking the words, more like the thing down in his guts is saying them and Steve—Steve is letting it.

Bucky keeps looking at him. Steve meets that unblinking gaze, fighting against the urge to protest his innocence, or maybe to protest Bucky's. He won't claim not to be lying because he's not. He isn't.

Slowly, the sniper fades from Bucky’s eyes. He looks down at the portraits littering the floor, lost again. A pang of some unpleasant feeling tightens Steve’s chest. It feels very nearly like guilt.

“I want,” Bucky says slowly. “I want to know what happened. What they did to me.”

Shaking off the strange moment, Steve rises and tries to ignore the way that Bucky tenses at the movement. “I do, too. So let’s find out together.”

He smiles and also does his best to ignore how Bucky looks at his mouth again.

-o-

The lead they’re chasing is thinner than thin: the Honduras safehouse hadn’t yielded much intel, but among the hastily-burned scraps were a few communication logs between that location and one approximately 15 clicks northeast of Rabat.

What they find is a metal tower: tall and impossibly narrow, it juts up into the sky peppered with more satellites than Steve knew even existed. The guardhouse stands empty and the fence around it, while electrified, is easily breached. The only sign of life is a tiny control room at the base of the tower, occupied by a single, thin man wearing a huge pair of headphones. He does not hear them coming, to busy tapping at a vast computer array.

And Steve is not thinking. They have come from Honduras and before that from DC; he has not forgotten what Bucky is, what he’s been made to do, but somehow it had softened in his mind, softened with the memory of who his friend used to be.

All of that drops away in an instant, which is how long it takes Bucky to break both of the man’s legs.

The man screams, his headphones flying to crash against the wall as Bucky heaves him up onto the computer array, a gun in his face. “ _Bucky_!” Steve shouts, grabbing for Bucky’s shoulder.

The gun swings around and is suddenly in Steve’s face. He draws up hard. Bucky’s expression is utterly blank. His eyes, lifeless.

“ _Je suis fidéle! Hail Hydra! Je n’ai pas deserte—_ ” The man’s eyes slide past Bucky and land on Steve. They widen. “Holy shit,” he says in heavily-accented English.

Bucky re-settles the muzzle of the gun against the man’s skull. He is silent, so after a moment Steve swallows hard and steps forward. “Who are you?”

“I have no name,” the man replies. “I am Hydra.”

“What is this place, who are you talking to here?”

“The world,” the man answers with a shaky yet proud smile. “I am the ears and the mouth. I am Hydra.”

Communications networks flash across multiple computer screens, too fast and in too many languages for Steve to understand. “You’re a relay station,” he guesses. “For what—North Africa? The whole Mediterranean?”

“ _The world_ ,” the man hisses, then whimpers when Bucky brings up one knee against the man’s thigh. “The others fled like cowards but I am loyal. The messages come and must be sent. You strike us but we will never die—already we are beginning new. I have stayed at my post, for I am—”

“Hydra, yeah, we got that,” Steve snaps, stepping up to the terminal, his fingers hovering. Most of this is beyond him; he’s still struggling to use his iPod. He sees code, numbers and letters in seemingly random sequences—

“Bases,” he realizes. “These locations, where you’re sending or receiving messages from...they’re all Hydra bases, aren’t they?”

Anxiety twists the man’s expression. “They said to destroy the tower, but it is my post. I am the ears and the mouth. This is my post. If—if I leave, then what am I?”

Pity twists with anger in Steve’s gut, makes him step closer. “Let him up.” Bucky tenses, his fist tightening on the man’s shirt. The gun stays where it is. “Let him up, Bucky. He’s not the enemy. They’ve used him just like they used you.”

Bucky’s expression flickers. His eyes slide from the man’s face to Steve, who squares his shoulders. “This isn’t what we do,” he says softly. “This isn’t who we are. We don’t kill needlessly, and we don’t—”

The thin man pitches sideways, knocking Bucky’s grip loose from his shirt. Bucky kicks back, which gives the man just enough space to yank a grenade out of his pocket and fit his finger through the ring. “ _Hail Hy—_ ”

Steve lunges forward, grabbing the man’s hands and keeping them from yanking apart and activating the grenade.

At the same time, Bucky fires. The bullet splits the skin of Steve’s temple as it passes before striking the man straight between the eyes. The back of his head splatters blood over the computer screens behind him.

Gritting his teeth, Steve lowers the man’s body to the floor before easing the grenade from his clenched fingers. The moment he’s set it safely down, rough hands are pulling him upright. Bucky seizes him by the jaw, turning Steve’s face towards him. His eyes are wide, frightened.

Swallowing, Steve starts to tell him, “I’m all ri—”

The hand holding his jaw pulls back and swings in with a punch that knocks Steve sideways. Too startled to catch himself, he falls into the terminal and quickly finds himself pinned there with the taste of blood in his mouth and Bucky’s metal fingers closed tight on the nape of his neck. His ribs, still tender, scream in protest.

“Do not,” Bucky’s voice says in his ear, close enough that Steve can feel his breath, “interfere again.”

Then he is gone, out the door of the tower’s control center. After spending a little longer coughing into the terminal, Steve heaves himself up. On the floor, the thin man stares sightlessly, oblivious to the steady _drip-drip-drip_ of his own blood and brain matter sliding down the computer terminal to which he gave his entire existence.

 

\--------

 

They are running again, but this time through the winding streets of—Bucky doesn’t know where. Steve is beside him and they are running.

There are people following them but Bucky isn’t afraid. He’s too busy trying to touch Steve, catch him in his hands. They keep making contact and bouncing away again, never long enough to give him what he wants. He pushes Steve into shops, trying to find a back room where they can—but there are always other people, some of whom start chasing them, too. They run down narrow hallways, crash through doors. The buildings keep changing eras, a dance hall and a computer lab and a disco and he doesn’t even know, he doesn’t care, he needs to touch Steve.

When they burst into an alleyway he can’t take it anymore and he pushes Steve up against a wall. Their knees knock together.

“Jesus, Bucky, can’t you keep it in your pants for five minutes?” Despite the exasperated tone, Steve is grinning up at him. Or down at him. Bucky isn’t sure.

He tries to kiss Steve but he’s wearing his mask. By the time he pulls back to tug at the straps their pursuers have reached the alley and they are off running again. Bucky curses them in Russian, in French and Hebrew, while Steve laughs.

The dream starts to fade and Bucky thinks, _No, no, not yet, I didn’t get to—_

It’s gone and he is in Tunisia. They’d found an empty house for sale. Steve had looked unhappy when Bucky broke the lock on the door, but after that semi-disaster in Morocco, they’d needed a place to lie low.

His prick is hard again. Worse, his skin feels extra-sensitive, like that first five minutes out of cryostasis when everything is raw and new. It makes no sense. The dream wasn’t—they hadn’t even _kissed._

But he’d wanted to. He wants a lot of half-formed things that he barely understands.

He turns his head.

Steve is lying on his stomach on the other side of the room; they have both refused to take the bed again. He’s stripped to a white tank top and boxers that follow the lines of his body, doing little to hide the shape underneath. In the minivan Bucky had seen the whole of Steve’s nudity, but at the time he’d been more concerned with hidden tracking devices and he hadn’t thought to look for the sake of looking.

He’s looking now.

It’s too dark to see Steve’s face very well, but Bucky can make out the smudge of his closed eyelashes, the darker pink of his mouth. His arms are tucked underneath his head as a pillow, and his strong back rises and falls with each breath.

He is big, bigger than Bucky. He hasn’t used that, though—he _won’t_ and god that makes something shoot through Bucky’s whole body, settling in his stomach. Steve will not hurt him. Bucky could—let him close enough to touch. Could let Steve touch him, maybe? He blanches, no, _no_. Too many places where he is weak.

The thread is slipping so he thinks instead of touching Steve. He traces the curve of Steve’s back with his eyes and imagines running his palm down that same path.

There. _Yes_. That sense of shivery lightning has returned. Bucky lets his eyes go in and out of focus, drinking in the visual of Steve’s sprawled body for reconnaissance before slipping back into his own mind. He pictures crawling across the floor and lying on top of Steve, stretched over him, his knees fitted to the hollows of Steve’s.

His hips twitch upwards, humping the air. The body remembers what the mind does not: Bucky has done this before. He can’t remember specifics but the movements return to him. His fingers dip under the waistband of his pants

His prick is...normal. He thinks. He is extensively familiar with the anatomy of the human body, where best to strike a man for an incapacitating blow. This—the firm yet soft length of flesh in his hand, is one of the most vulnerable places. Many, many nerve endings, especially on the underside near the head.

Almost too many: he squeezes himself too hard at first and has to choke back a noise. _The asset is silent._

He twists away from the thought (memory?) and the taste of rubber in his mouth, fixing his eyes back on Steve. Steve is real. Steve is the furthest thing from the thought-memories that weave through Bucky’s mind. Steve is breath and muscle and bodyheat and a particular smell; if Bucky inhales deeply through his nose he can catch that scent lingering in the confines of their room. It drives the taste of rubber away and draws Bucky’s attention back to his prick.

His fingers fumble, too dry until they catch a bit of fluid leaking from the tip. Then they slide. Bucky draws up one heel on the floor, spreading his legs to give himself more room. Moves his hand. His stomach muscles tense and relax and tense and relax. He lets his hand follow that rhythm, rising and falling. Moves it faster.

Steve shifts a little in his sleep and Bucky goes still, holding his breath. He can feel his heartbeat in his prick, beating against his fingertips. Pressure is building in his abdomen and it is a physical effort not to move his hips or his hand. It is simple instinct to do so: he has seen this used on prisoners, to break them mentally and physically. He has never done it, with his chemically-neutered prick, but he knows how effective it can be.

He does not want Steve to think that Bucky is about to do that to him—not that Steve is much of a prisoner. Steve, as he keeps telling Bucky, is his...friend.

But—he lied, before, about Bucky kissing him. And about Bucky being in love with him.

At least, Bucky thinks he was lying. He has no evidence except Steve’s own tells; he doesn’t remember kissing Steve, but he thinks that—he wants to, in his dreams.

Steve has been the first real thing in the whole of Bucky’s existence. (Twenty days. _Twenty-one?_ ) If he is lying, then...Bucky doesn’t know what then. He knows that he doesn’t want to deal with that yet.

Steve settles with his head now turns away from Bucky. The nape of his neck is soft with golden hair, still showing faint bruises where Bucky had gripped him a day ago in Morocco. In his mind Bucky puts his face there, his mouth against Steve’s skin, open, tasting those marks.

He grits his teeth, makes himself wait another thirty seconds.

When he finally, _finally_ strokes himself again it is an arch of the back and a full-body give, all of his training and conditioning washed away by pleasure. For the first time he can remember he is aware of every part of him, every inch of skin and muscles straining together, pulled in tight and needy, aching for release.

At the same time he is somewhere else: he’s here on the floor in Tunis, the salt and garbage smell of the sea floating through the window, and he is in another room, cooler and cluttered, with the honk of cars outside. Steve is in that other room with him too but he is smaller, his breathing labored. Bucky wants to rub his back and kiss his neck, tuck Steve into his side until he warms; but he doesn’t, he stays on this side of the room and presses one hand over his mouth as his hips jerks and wetness spills over his belly and knuckles.

In the other-room the palm of his hand is rough and cracked from the day’s labor. In the here-room, it is smooth and tastes of metal.

Slowly the other-room fades and he is left in himself, trying to breathe quietly, still holding his softening prick in a loose grip. It’s hyper-sensitive now, enough that every twitch of his fingers makes him shudder. He does that for a little while longer, trying to hold onto that feeling of completeness.

Across the room, Steve sleeps on unaware. Bucky watches him breathe before silently getting up to find a cloth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky masturbates while fantasizing about Steve, who is asleep across the room and has in no way consented. There is no physical contact between them.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a sexual situation involving highly dubious consent. Please see end notes for further details.

Compared to New York and DC, Italy hasn’t changed that much since the last time Steve saw it. They’d only passed through on one of the USO tours, but it had been filthy and beautiful in equal amounts; he’d longed to slip away to see the Sistine Chapel, David, even the Coliseum.

Of course they hadn’t, yet all of those things are still there. Maybe, maybe, one day—

He pushes that thought aside. He’s got bigger fish to fry than some long-buried artistic yearning.

Some of the streets here look the same as they did seventy years ago, which Steve is grateful for. It does make for a strange if navigable journey: sometimes his mind fuzzes on exactly what year they’re in, and it isn’t until a high-end motorcycle roars past or an airliner soars overhead that he recollects himself.

Beside him, Bucky doesn’t seem to share his mental disconnect—but then, very little emotion makes it to onto Bucky’s face. Unless it is the night terrors and those moments during daylight when Bucky will go still, his face slack and his eyes seeing things that aren’t there, before he jerks back to himself. Sometimes it takes a minute, sometimes it’s twenty.

Thus far it’s only happened when they are alone. Either Bucky must trust him enough on some level to go those places, or Steve himself is the trigger for the episodes.

This is more than simple amnesia or battle fatigue. Not that any of those things could have made Bucky do the things the Winter Soldier has done, but this is far beyond any kind of brainwashing or mind manipulation that Steve has ever heard about. Bucky moves different, in ways that can’t simply be attributed to the metal arm. His voice has changed, inflections entirely dissimilar to what Steve remembers.

Except every now and then, there will be a gesture or a tip of the head, some small thing that is purely _Bucky_. And he saved Steve from the river. Whatever they did to him for seventy years, he managed to break through.

Not for the first time, he wishes that he could contact Sam or Natasha. Sam has his work at the VA and Natasha—well, Steve still doesn’t know the backstory to what or who made Natasha the way she is, but he can guess that she’d have something to say about this.

He can also guess, though, how the idea of contacting them would go over with Bucky as he is right now. By now Steve has healed from the injuries he incurred on the helicarrier, but he doesn’t doubt that Bucky could disappear again if he got spooked and even at 100% Steve doubts his ability to track Bucky down if he doesn’t want to be found.

Improbably they’ve fallen into a kind of rhythm: every two days they move to a new location, never in the same city, often not in the same country. Wherever they land, Steve will take out his growing set of paperwork. There are the pictures for Bucky, maps of as many places as he could grab on the go, and one massive printout of the data from that relay station in Rabat.

It’s a hundred pages of dense, encoded missives. Steve was never an intel kind of guy but he can figure out a cryptogram given enough time. It’s slow, tedious work, and he hunkers down into it gratefully.

A guilty voice whispers that it’s easier than trying to figure out Bucky.

While Steve works on breaking the code or, when he gets too frustrated, draws another picture, Bucky prowls the edges of whatever shabby room they’ve found for the night. He watches the streets from their windows, analyzing every passerby with the same suspicion. He goes over the drawings that Steve presents him with, helpfully labeled “Jim Morita,” “Sam Wilson,” or “Eliza Barnes, your mother.” He shows little interest in the ones that depict their childhood, focusing instead on SHIELD and Hydra personnel both present and past. He asks about their time in the Army then gets impatient when Steve starts in on a story about Jim and the goat herder in Norway. He doesn’t eat unless Steve physically places food in front of him and he doesn’t sleep unless Steve does as well (and even then, he adamantly refuses to use a bed). He doesn't bathe or seem to notice small injuries like bleeding knuckles until Steve points them out, but he does calisthenics every morning like clockwork, no matter if they'd already spent half the night swimming from Sicily to the coast of Italy. He does not let Steve out of his sight.

Sometimes Steve will look up from his work to find Bucky watching him with the same intensity that Steve has been directing at lines of code, only to look away again quickly. That's another thing: eye contact. Steve's noticed that Bucky always directs his gaze just a little to the left of Steve's even when they're talking. Never once does he look Steve right in the eye.

 _Jesus God_ , Steve thinks. _What the hell did they do to you, Buck?_

They pass this way through Palmi, Avellino, and Montefiascone, heading steadily north. Steve doesn’t know if Bucky is following some internal homing beacon or thinking strategically. North is as good a direction as any, though, and it buys Steve time to come up with better intel.

In Ferrara he finally does.

He’s sitting in the middle of several concentric rings of paper, his deciphering attempts spread out around him on the floor in order of “unlikely” to “not even in the ball park.” He’s tried the square cipher method and the Caesar shift. He’s created whole _tabula recta_ charts to no avail. With a sinking feeling in his stomach he’s spent the last three days trying Vigenère ciphers of various lengths, starting with _Hydra_ as the key and working through every single permutation thereof.

It would have to be something relatively simple, for so many people around the world to be receiving and sending messages using the same code. They probably change the key on a regular basis but if he can figure out at least one of them—

He tries _SHIELD._

_message begins all active units in southeast quadrant—_

“I got it!” Steve yelps, scrambling up. _alert level red in east quadrant evac all sensitive materials priority_. “Bucky! Bucky, I think I’ve got it, I’ve cracked—”

Words escape him as he rounds the corner and takes in the sight before him. Bucky is shirtless, his tank top apparently grown too sweaty and dirty for even him to handle. He is—Steve doesn’t even know what he’s doing. Bucky has one foot stretched out behind him, the other hooked over the metal arm planted firmly on the floor, and his flesh-and-blood hand lifted towards the ceiling. Steve’s seen people do this kind of contortionist stretching before, in Central Park, but never to this...level.

Every single muscle in Bucky’s body is stretched taut, standing out from his skin in high relief. His eyes are closed, expression as tight as his muscles.

As Steve watches, frozen in the doorway with his mouth hanging open, Bucky slowly and impossibly shifts his center of gravity forward until his back foot lifts off the floor and all of his balance is on the metal arm. He unhooks the other leg from his elbow and brings them both up into the air—slowly, slowly—until he is doing the splits upside-down, still balanced on that one hand.

A bead of sweat rolls down over the swell of his shoulder. It hangs for a long moment, shivering from the strain of Bucky’s muscles, before it drips off to splat on the floor.

Steve stays rooted in place until Bucky finishes twisting and balancing in every conceivable direction. He winds up seated with the soles of his feet pressed together, his knees splayed out to either side and his shoulders slumping out of the rigid posture he’s maintained through the whole, silent routine. He looks up at Steve with his hair hanging in his face, sticking to his sweaty skin.

Abruptly Steve realizes that his own body has gone hot. His face must be bright red. He stammers, “I cracked—there was a key cipher and I—I think I broke it. I, you should come see when you’re—done.”

“Okay,” Bucky says, still just looking at him.

Steve stumbles backward out of the room and goes back to his ring of papers. He sits down on the floor and stares at the numbers and letters for a long moment, his heart racing.

This needs to not happen right now. There are things Steve needs to do. Important things that matter a lot more than the distant echo of a—a teenaged crush, if he could even call it that. Puberty had been a rough time for Steve: Ma had just started to get really sick and the resulting dip in her income made a bad situation worse for them both. 

In the midst of all that, carrying a torch for his best pal hadn’t seemed like that big a deal. The heat thrumming in Steve’s chest right now—it’s the same way he’d felt that summer he’d turned sixteen, when Steve’s whole world felt like it existed in the widening span of Bucky’s shoulders.

It’s not like he ever did anything about it. From the time he grew into his own body, Bucky always had a girl on his arm. For a while Steve thought that he’d wind up as one of those confirmed bachelor types, half-married to all the widows in the neighborhood but then Peggy had come along and it’d been a big relief. That was how things went back then: whatever stray thoughts you had running around your skull, you married a lady. Anything else—just didn’t count.

It still doesn’t. Christ, Bucky is in the other room with a head full of razor blades. Even _thinking_ about him like this makes Steve feel scummy.

Shaking himself, he retrieves his pencil from behind his ear and gets back to work.

 

\--------

 

At first it is a strain to exist around Steve all the time. Act human. If he doesn’t then Steve starts to get this worried look on his face, so Bucky tries to remember to blink at the right intervals and tell Steve that he is hungry or thirsty once in a while even if he hadn't actually noticed that sensation. It’s worth it for the way Steve will settle and go back to treating Bucky like he's normal, a person.

That satisfies a hunger in Bucky that runs deeper than the need for food. He watches Steve’s gestures, the way he talks to people even though Bucky has yet to attempt interacting with anyone else. They are not Steve. They would not be so forgiving of his—of the effort it takes sometimes. 

Steve overlooks those moments because he wants Bucky to be his old friend; he looked at Bucky and saw a real person before _Bucky_ did. 

There’s so much to remember that he’s begun to use the categorization system that his former masters had drilled into him ( _literally_?) for mission reports. There are fact-memories, verified by multiple sources. His name is James Buchanan Barnes, says Steve and the museum. He was a soldier in the Second World War before he died. (Facts are unreliable. The system breaks down.)

Next come Steve-memories, things that Steve has told him. Bucky Barnes was a good man who grew up with Steve. They were friends. (Only friends.)

Then there are the dreams. He would write them off altogether, shove them away into a box, except they run rampant over all the other categories. Sometimes he is Bucky-that-was in the dreams and sometimes he is the Winter Soldier; sometimes the dream follows the course of a mission that feels utterly and completely real, and other times it twists into sexual fantasy.

About Steve. Fantasies about Steve, specifically. 

The dreams confuse and frustrate more than arouse him. Did these things happen? Did he ever press his lips to the edge of Steve’s jaw while they sat on an ice float? Steve says no, that Bucky only ever kissed him that time when he was drunk, and it didn’t matter. (Why didn't it matter?) Did he ever slide his hands (both human) up the back of Steve’s uniform to set his nails in the skin of his strong back? Or did he invent that altogether? It seems unlikely: he is the Winter Soldier, the asset, killer; why would anything tender grow from the blood-stained ground in his mind?

Were they together before, but now Steve doesn’t want to be and lied about it? It’s been a long time—except it hasn’t. It has been two years or seventy or some indeterminate span that Bucky can’t remember, built up every time they pulled him out of the tank and sparked him to life again. (Time is unreliable.)

It festers in his thoughts like an ugly wound that he tries not to touch. It is not important. He has a mission, scraped together out of his own head: he wants to know what Hydra did to him, and he wants to make them pay. Kill or be killed.

He has few resources. A few weapons and ammunition taken from the guardhouse of the tower in Morocco. Intel gleaned from invisible messages buzzing around the world. Steve.

It isn’t much, but he is the Winter Soldier. No matter the odds, he always completes his mission.

(All except one.)

-o-

They move easier now: Europe is familiar ground to them both and far more accessible. The borders have shifted again since the last time Bucky was here, but Steve understands the maps and Bucky knows how to not actually exist in the world, leave no traces behind.

The code that Steve cracked sends them to Slovenia. Hydra must have realized the relay tower was compromised, because when they reach the base—built into the cliffside, facing the ocean, with some kind of underwater tunnel in the rock—it’s clearly been evacuated. Only a skeleton crew remains. The trucks parked out in front of the loading docks have SHIELD logos on them, something that makes Steve’s mouth twist.

Bucky puts away his gun and is readying his knives when Steve touches his arm. Startled, Bucky knocks his hand away. It’s happened a few times in the past weeks: brushes of skin, incidental to prolonged close quarters, that he’s struggled not to interpret as a threat. (Or anything else.)

People have touched him extensively before without asking, without even looking at him, as casual as lifting a tool or closing a door, but there is nothing casual about Steve’s touch.

Steve shows Bucky his palms. “It’s more useful to us if we get someone alive, right?” he whispers. “So that we can question them.”

Bucky cocks his head then nods. It occurs to him that Steve thinks this would be a mercy. In Bucky’s experience, swift death was far more merciful than taking prisoners. Not that his masters cared much for mercy.

Steve is still looking at him, his brows furrowed together. “Be careful, okay?” he whispers.

 _You, too_. The words rise up Bucky’s throat but die before they reach his mouth. They confuse him. They are not important.

Apparently Steve’s mercy has its limits. He kills the first two guards they encounter himself, snapping their necks. Bucky finds himself hanging back, analyzing his movements. For his size, Steve is impressively agile; still, he has a tendency to plant himself in place and let his opponent come to him. That, Bucky thinks, was his mistake before. He’d engaged with Steve at close quarters when he should have stood back and used long-range weapons, circled and circled until Steve was off balance and then—

He jerks back to himself. His stomach is turning over so violently that for a moment he thinks he might actually be sick. Instead he throws one blade into the throat of a Hydra agent walking out the open door of a barracks and uses the other to cut down the man approaching Steve from the side.

An alarm begins to blare. Tucking his knives away, Bucky swings down the M16—inferior quality, tendency to jam in sandy climates, but so widely used that finding ammo should never be a problem—from his shoulder. If this were a regular mission, he would be sinking back into the shadows of the building behind him and picking off opponents from there.

Steve, though, is right out in the moonlight, fighting with the last of the perimeter guards. The first wave of response to the alarm appears, taking up cover among the buildings. Bucky picks them off quickly, conserving bullets.

A familiar cold detachment settles over him as he fires again and again. It feels a little like he’s floating, just slightly removed from his own body. He notes the kick of the rifle against his shoulder and automatically corrects his aim. Each bullet finds its path to the life it’s meant to take.

Once the first wave has fallen, Bucky moves on. He reloads the weapon as he goes. The layout of the base is familiar (Has he been here before? It doesn’t matter.) with scattered barracks and guardhouses acting as a buffer for the command center perched above the submarine bay. Bucky heads in that direction, pausing to pry a Kalishnikov from the hands of a dying man before using it to finish him off. Far superior weapon. Briefly he misses the person (people?) whose job it was to hand him the appropriate gear while on missions; then he remembers that those same people were the ones who brought him back to the chair.

Those people may be on this base tonight.

He moves forward.

The main building is three stories above ground and probably twice that below. Scaling the side of a smaller building—garage, should hold fuel and other flammable liquids—he peers down the scope of the weapon into the windows of the building. The top two floors appear to be empty, but multiple targets move behind the narrow windows of the ground floor. He fires, killing at least five and wounding several others before this side of the building empties out, targets either taking cover or evacuating for the sub-levels.

Distantly he’s aware of Steve moving on the ground below him, headed for the building. Leaping down, Bucky follows.

They meet little resistance on the first level of the command center. Bucky puts the Kalishnikov on his shoulder and takes out a Glock, shooting anyone who emerges from cover. He hears Steve saying something but ignores it. No one speaks to the asset on missions.

An explosion knocks out the wall to his right and he tumbles sideways. His ear on that side is briefly compromised, filled with a flat ringing. Rising and shaking away the rubble, he squints through the broken wall. Server bank. Not the primary one, but likely a more advanced relay center. Someone wanted to protect intel so they used multiple putty explosives to destroy the main server.

Only one of the explosives detonated. A much larger one is still in place, hastily taped on. Useful.

Wading through the rubble and shooting someone half-buried but still struggling, Bucky peels off the unexploded putty. It’s an impact-triggered explosive device. The person on the floor was probably intending to shoot it from a safe distance before it fired prematurely.

Carrying the putty carefully, Bucky strides back into the hall and makes for the elevator. They’ll be on lock-down, likely with plenty of security measures in the shafts to keep out intruders. Taking out his largest blade, he kneels and shoves it between the closed doors. It forces them apart a scant half-inch, but that’s all the distance that Bucky needs to get his fingers in and heave the doors open apart the rest of the way.

Holding them open with one hand, he drops the putty explosive down the shaft.

He’s only just let the doors fall shut again when a hand grabs his shoulder, pulling him up. Startled that someone got that close, he spins—and only just stops himself from putting a bullet in Steve’s head.

Steve is sweaty and red in the face. There’s bits of rubble in his blond hair. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouts. It sounds tinny; Bucky’s right ear is still not functioning optimally.

What is he doing? Bucky actually has to look around. There are three targets down in their immediate area, two dead and one dying. Behind him, the elevator doors groan with the force of the explosion far down the elevator shaft. They’ll be able to proceed downward safely now. What does Steve think he is doing?

“There could be prisoners down there!” Steve is yelling. “They could be holding someone just like you! And you want to just blindly blow them up?”

Bucky had just enough time to think that if there was anyone like him down there then they probably _should_ be blown up (and they might even be grateful) before all of his attention goes past Steve. A target has come through the hole in the wall to the server room and aimed at the back of Steve’s head.

She fires.

The bullet hits Bucky’s metal hand. He doesn’t even remember putting it there—he’d moved faster than he’d even thought possible of himself, cupping Steve’s head and pulling him forward into Bucky, twisting sideways to cover him with his body.

They hit the ground with a roll and Steve gets his gun up first, putting two bullets in the woman’s chest and one dead center in her forehead.

It is, Bucky thinks through the fog, an excellent shot.

 

\--------

 

They slip back across the Italian border in a government vehicle with no prisoners, several stacks of files, and the base sending flames to the sky behind them.

In the passenger seat Bucky is utterly still, staring forward at the road. He doesn't respond to Steve's voice or even his hesitant touch. It's like he isn't even there.

As they approach Ferrara he starts to come out of it, looking at the passing streets like he’s confused. He stares at Steve with something close to fear in his eyes. It makes sense: Bucky's said that he remembers feeling cold, and a dark chamber filled with ice. Seeing as how Steve found his way to this century by being frozen, they've concluded that Hydra must have been doing something similar to Bucky...whenever they didn't have a use for him.

For seventy years, the conclusion of a successful mission has meant going back to the ice.

Steve speaks quietly about not much at all. He tells Bucky about meeting Thor for the first time and hearing stories about Asgard. Midway through he begins to wonder whether he should be relating such otherworldly events to someone who barely has contact with _this_ reality; but they seem to be helping, or Bucky’s just naturally shaking off the daze he’d fallen into at the base, because .

It’d been a jolt to look up from taking down a guard to find Bucky moving steadily, inexorably through the base, his eyes lifeless and barely blinking. It had brought Sam Wilson’s words back to Steve’s mind: _He’s the kind of guy you stop_.

Steve shoves those thoughts away. They’d gathered important intel: the decoded missives indicate that this base had housed the Winter Soldier at some point. Walking its halls, Steve had been struck all over again at how deep the disease ran: a few upper levels bore the SHIELD insignia, mostly the control room with videocom, but everything below that had been pure Hydra.

In the sub-levels—or what was left of them after the blast—they’d found files, actual _files_ that someone had considered important enough to keep locked up but not enough to destroy. Likely there are digital copies, and the physical versions simply had been forgotten.

Steve would want to thank whoever failed to destroy the files if he didn’t also want to beat them bloody with his own hands.

They ditch the stolen truck and slip back to their rented room. By now one day has rolled into the next and Steve has that weary yet unpleasantly awake feeling that he always gets after missions. Usually he burns through it on his own: back in the Howling Commandos it’d been something to feel grateful for, his ability to take first watch while everyone else crawled into their bedrolls. These days it just makes him feel more alone, sitting up uselessly while everyone else slips into well-deserved rest.

Bucky doesn’t seem tired, though. They get back to the room and after a moment’s hesitation he wordlessly begins breaking down and putting away their weapons. His body is still rigid, muscles tight and movements sharp. Steve carefully leaves him to his self-appointed task and instead digs through the thick satchel of files they’d managed to grab from storage.

The front of each file is emblazoned with the Hydra logo and the phrase ‘проект Потусторонний полный.’ Steve snaps a picture of the words with his phone before he digs into the files. Most of it’s old, papers turned brown and soft at the edges and written in either German, which Steve barely reads, or Cyrillic, which he doesn’t know at all. The earliest date he can find on the file headings is March of 1958; the latest is 1979.

A photograph slips out as he turns a page. It’s of a man in his fifties, proudly wearing the uniform of a British colonel. It’d been clipped to what has to be a mission report: Steve has written and read enough of those to recognize their format in any language. The man, he thinks, was William Benedict Adler. There are dates and multiple mentions of a place called Tiergarten. Steve thinks he remembers that as being one of the provinces of Germany administered by Great Britain after the war, when the superpowers of the time had divided up the country like so many cooks elbowing for space in a kitchen.

He finds another photograph. This time it’s a color picture of a man with a thick moustache. The quality is grainy, the man’s features indistinct.

Frowning, Steve closes the file and turns it sideways. Gripping the bottom left corner to hold the larger pages in place, he shakes the whole thing.

An avalanche of photos tumbles out, sliding off the side of the table and onto the floor. Bucky, who is just coming back into the room, stops short. “What is that?”

“Not sure.” Kneeling, Steve begins to gather up the photographs, flipping over the ones that had landed on their face. There are about a dozen: mostly men, a few women. Some are clearly scientists, others wear suits and sit in front of flags. One or two are mugshots.

He is just starting to put it together and desperately wish them back in the folder, wish the folder at the bottom of the ocean when Bucky beats him to it:

“I killed them.”

Steve lifts his head. Bucky has picked up two of the photographs left on the table. Steve can’t see them from his place crouched on the floor. “You remember that?” Steve asks, sick with it.

“No. But I know that I did.” Blinking, Bucky transfers his gaze to the floor and crouches down beside Steve, who resists the urge to sweep the photographs up, hide them. Instead he holds agonizingly still as Bucky nudges them apart with his fingertips, so hesitant and delicate in his movements now—the opposite of the striding whirlwind of violence that Steve had seen earlier. His eyes have that blank quality again, though.

The photos all have small holes near their top edge, as if at some point they’d been stuck to something with a pushpin before being taken down and put away. Steve can’t help but imagine why: the visual of an assassination target stuck where everyone could see, or maybe a wall of completed missions.

Trophies that Hydra officers could lift their glasses to. The thought makes his blood hot.

He flips over another picture and jerks in recognition. It’s Howard—Howard Stark. The photo looks like it was taken from a magazine; Howard has that expression on his face, the one that Dugan used to call his pinup look. Doubtless there were some young gals across the country who did pin it up.

Steve can’t help the small pained sound that he makes. Bucky looks at him sharply then at the photograph of Howard. “He was...a friend,” Steve tells him. “He was _our_ friend, during the war.”

Bucky stares at Howard’s features and Steve can see him straining to remember. It hurts to watch—part of Steve is desperate for some crack in the wall of Bucky’s mind but right now, with twenty years of death laid out in front of them...

“It’s all right if you don’t remember,” he says and Bucky throws down the picture in his hands.

“Don’t fucking tell me it’s all right,” he growls, glaring at Steve as he shoves up from the floor. “I killed him.”

“It wasn’t _you_ ,” Steve insists. “You and Howard got on like a house on fire, you never would’ve hurt him.”

“But I fucking _did_ , didn’t I?” Bucky pushes his hands into his too-long hair, raking it back and wincing when his fingers catch in tangles. “They told me to kill him and I just—did. Why did I do that? They gave me weapons. I could have fought them.”

“They would have killed you.”

Bucky barks a strangled laugh. “Maybe they shoulda.”

“Don’t—do _not_ say that.” Steve has been frightened of this since the beginning. Since Zola’s lab, if he is honest with himself. “I know you. They took a good man, one of the best I’ve ever known, and made him into the Winter Soldier.”

“ _How_?” Bucky’s actually pacing now. His metal arm whirs as he opens and closes his fists; the bullet that he took to the hand has damaged it in ways that Steve doesn’t understand and doesn’t know how to ask about. “I don’t know. What does that mean, that they _made me_ like this? Am I not—what did they _do_?”

It’s Steve’s turn to say, “I don’t know,” then stiffen as Bucky reels on him, his eyes wild.

“ _You’re supposed to fucking know_ ,” he snarls. “You’re supposed to be able to _tell me_ , that’s the whole reason I went after you, how can you not _fucking_ —”

He’s practically spitting, all of his bulky new muscles wound up tight. The skin around his mouth still has blood smeared amongst the thickening facial hair; he doesn’t seem to notice the blood or how his hair is getting matted or how he’s been wearing the same clothes for the last two weeks and has truly started to smell. 

Steve has noticed and tried not to. This is his friend, his best friend—and at the same time this disheveled man with blood under his fingernails is a complete stranger. One whose victims litter the floor at their feet.

He has learned to be careful over these few weeks traveling with Bucky—no threatening gestures, nothing that could be construed as violent—but now for the first time he isn’t. He stands up and Bucky sees, sees the way Steve is looking at that bloody stranger.

The tension in the room snaps and Bucky goes for his throat.

He gets the metal hand clamped around Steve’s trachea before Steve’s back hits the wall behind him. Wood splinters loudly. Steve lets the force of the impact spin them to the side, hard enough that Bucky slams into the wall, too.

Bucky’s face is locked in a snarl. He brings his left knee up and Steve blocks with his own; he has both his own hands wrapped around Bucky’s wrist, trying to find purchase, some way of unlocking the metal grip. His breath is entirely cut off and if he doesn’t get Bucky to let go he’s going to lose consciousness.

Bucky swings at him with his other fist and Steve takes the hit to his temple. The force of it is enough that Bucky’s fingers slip on his neck and he uses that, punching the metal arm as hard as he can. He feels his knuckles split but he is free.

Backing up, he sucks in a breath and gasps, “Bucky, stop!”

Bucky comes after him. They move steadily across the room. It’s a flurry of strikes and blocks, Steve always on the defensive. There’s no strategy to Bucky’s movements, just a solid wall of savagery. If Steve wanted to, he could take Bucky down hard in a matter of seconds.

He doesn’t. In the absence of innocent lives to protect, there is nothing that Steve wants to do less than hurt Bucky.

He tries to communicate this in panting breaths, even as his forearms sprout bruises and his knuckles bleed red. “Bucky! You don’t have to—do this, you’re not—this person. This wasn’t your— _fault_.”

Bucky gets him against the far wall and Steve desperately puts him in an arm lock. They are face-to-face, their noses almost touching. Locking his gaze with Bucky’s, Steve says, “You’re a good person, I know you, you’re the best person I’ve ever—”

Bucky headbutts him. Steve isn’t expecting it and the blow catches him right in the center of his forehead. Lights explode in his vision.

He hits the ground on his back and has enough coordination left to cross his arms over his chest and abdomen, just as Bucky brings down his metal fist aimed at sternum. 

Above him, Bucky’s face is twisted in pain. “Liar,” he hisses. “You’re a fucking _liar_.”

Steve hooks his foot behind Bucky’s knee, brings him down. They grapple on the floor. Underneath them the photographs of Bucky’s victims twist and turn. Steve is stronger, bigger, but he’s hampered by his unwillingness to strike full-force and disoriented by the two blows to his head.

Several dents in the floor, a broken table, and shattered glass later, Bucky gets his knees locked around Steve’s thighs and Steve’s wrists pinned to the floor to either side of his head.

“You want to tell me how good I am?” Bucky says between his teeth, glaring.

“You are,” Steve tells him. He has to fight his own instincts and training, forcing his body to go limp. “You would never have done any of this willingly.”

“You think that _matters_?”

“It does. They did this, not you.”

“What do you fucking know?” At some point Steve must have landed a blow after all: blood oozes slowly from a cut in Bucky’s eyebrow. Either that or he did the damage to himself.

Then Bucky shifts, reaching down with his right hand to—to cup Steve’s groin through his pants.

Steve freezes. It feels like all of the oxygen leaves his body at once—not just from his lungs but from each individual cell and all the spaces in between. He doesn’t know what his face does but it makes Bucky bare his teeth.

Steve croaks, “What’re you—”

“You want to tell me how good I am?” Bucky asks again, low.

There’s metal around Steve’s right wrist again, keeping it pinned to the floor. He can feel blood trickling from his nose, going across his cheek. Steve’s left hand is free but it stings. Glass litters the floor and there’s a big shard underneath the back of his palm.

Above him, Bucky’s eyes narrow. His hand shifts, yanking at the front of Steve’s pants. 

Steve watches in a haze of shock as Bucky pulls Steve’s prick out, then his own. Steve’s seen it before—barracks and makeshift baths in whatever non-frozen body of water they came across during the war, and plenty of times before that in the course of their shared lives—but never like this: half-hard, flushed red, and arching towards his belly.

Bucky’s face has gone weird and tight, like he’s braced for a blow. He leans over Steve, rolling his hips so that their pricks fall together, lined up between them. Steve is soft but it’s been too long, too much running and not enough privacy. His body responds on its own, blood pooling into his cock and filling it out.

Steve’s fingers flex. The glass shard cuts into them and he closes his hand around it, letting the sting of its edges ground him, sharpen his awareness.

Bucky’s eyes flicker. He sees. He bares his teeth again, as if in challenge.

Their cocks rub together, skin catching in some places and sliding in others. Steve just barely has time to think that it’d feel better if there was more—and then Bucky is pulling his hand away to quickly lick his hand from the base of his palm to the tips of his fingers.

When he grips them again, fingers not quite encircling both their shafts, the contrast of his rough, callused fingers and the soft, thin skin of his prick makes Steve’s belly clench. It isn’t the first time that someone has touched him this way, pulling the foreskin of his prick back from the vulnerable head, but it’s _Bucky_ touching him, Bucky’s prick rubbing against his.

Bucky’s face, starting to go slack and losing that feral edge. His chin drops against his chest and his eyes pinch shut. His brows draw together. He looks hurt. Feverish. Scared.

It would be easy to swing at him, to knock him off. To slash at his throat.

Steve relaxes his hand, letting go of the glass shard.

His hand is bleeding. He wishes it weren’t—wishes he could be sure of reaching out without Bucky interpreting that as a threat. Wishes he could find a way to grasp and hold, to turn this into something less terrifying because this is still _Bucky_ , and Steve can’t lose him this way. Can’t lose him any way, but _god_ , not like this. He can’t.

So he lets himself sink back, lets his hips jerk and gives himself over to this. Bucky groans in response. He clumsily rubs the heads of their pricks with his palm, squeezing. 

The blood from Bucky’s eyebrow has dripped down across his cheek. It looks like a tearstain.

Bucky comes first, his hips grinding against Steve’s almost painfully and his teeth set in his bottom lip hard enough to leave red marks. His come spills hot over Steve’s cock, his knuckles bumping against Steve as he works himself almost frantically. That, more than anything, is what sends Steve over the edge after him: he has known Bucky all his life but never seen this sheer vulnerability.

As his own orgasm washes over him, Steve forgets all about blood and the need to appear non-threatening. He lifts his cut-up hand and pushes it into Bucky’s hair. That and Bucky’s hand tight on his wrist, Bucky’s fingers on his prick, those are the only things left in the wash of momentary pleasure and relief.

He thinks he says Bucky’s name. He thinks it sounds desperately, hopelessly grateful.

Someone pounds at the door to their room. A woman’s voice shouts about noise and _polizia_.

Bucky’s eyes snap open. For a frozen moment he stares down at Steve, who is still gasping himself back into his own body. For the first time, he meets Steve's eyes. 

The wall cracks and behind it there is need, and horror. Shame.

Then he is gone, wrenching away so fast that he leaves strands of hair between Steve’s fingers. There’s the crash of a window breaking.

The door opens and Steve scrambles to tuck himself back into his pants. The landlady, a short Italian grandma, must catch the movement because she screws her face up and starts waving her hands, yelling too fast for Steve’s foggy mind to translate. Whatever she’s saying, it isn’t good.

Steve catches the woman, spins her, and puts her into the most careful sleeper hold he can manage.

Once she’s laid out on the floor with a pillow under her head, he moves fast, grabbing only the essentials. The printouts of code, the files from the base, weapons—a hooded sweater thrown over his soiled shirt. The photographs, he leaves scattered on the floor. A few people are in the hallway, wide eyes and loud voices, so he goes out the window after Bucky.

He lands on both feet and almost tumbles onto his ass. His legs feel like jelly.

Pushing upright, he sprints to the end of the street. Takes a left. Keeps running, full tilt, heedless of anyone who might look at him and wonder at his speed. Reaches the end of the street. Takes a right. Slows down.

He’s shaking all over, the adrenaline of the fight and the—the other thing breaking like a wave on his back. His t-shirt is sticking to his chest and he slows to a walk as he fumbles with the zipper of the sweater and flips the hood up over his head.

He slows to a stop, adjusts the backpack on his shoulders. Looks up and down the street both ways. No one looks back.

After a minute, he crosses the street and keeps walking.

Eventually he finds a running fountain that looks reasonably clean. By now most of the traffic has died and he peels off his t-shirt, dipping one clean sleeve in the water before roughly wiping down his face and torso. The shirt comes away streaked with blood and come. Steve thinks about dunking his head in, but the water doesn’t look _that_ clean. He’ll have bruises tomorrow—usually he heals too fast for them, but after the helicarrier he had a collar of purpled skin from where Bucky had gripped his throat.

He’s just finished wringing the shirt out on the sidewalk when he catches movement in the corner of his eye.

Bucky is a smear in the darkness, barely visible except for the glint of his arm. He stands in a doorway about forty feet away and doesn’t come any closer. The pale oval of his face is turned towards Steve.

The night air feels cold on Steve’s bare chest and shoulders, but he makes himself pull on the sweater at a normal speed. Crumpling the t-shirt up, he wraps it around his bloodied hand before heaving the pack onto his shoulders.

He stands by the fountain, his fingers slowly curling in the sleeves of the sweater, and waits. When Bucky finally moves out of the doorway, silent as a ghost, Steve takes a deep, unsteady breath and follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the middle of severe mental strain, Bucky first assaults Steve physically and then sexually. Steve allows the sex to happen because he doesn't want to hurt Bucky.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He should kill Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains discussion of dub-con, specifically the incident that happened last chapter, and what could be read as victim-blaming on the part of the victim.

He should kill Steve.

It’s the only logical action. Steve doesn’t know what happened in the blank place between ‘Bucky Barnes, Sergeant’ and—and what Bucky is now. As a life model, he has also revealed himself to be disappointingly inconsistent. He kisses Bucky on a train then denies ever having done it before. He gets angry with Bucky for blowing up the lower levels of the Hydra base in a combat situation then insists it doesn’t matter that Bucky assassinated a friend of his. The contradictions confuse Bucky at a time when he needs clarity.

Steve is confusing. Steve has outlived his usefulness.

Really, he should have killed Steve back on the helicarrier. ( _Before that?_ Steve says he saw Bucky in the streets, that Bucky didn’t know him; Bucky thinks he’s wrong but doesn’t know about which part.) It’s clear to him now that his masters no longer had any use for him, that he was never meant to come back from the mission to kill Steve. He could have completed it then gone to ground, disappeared forever. They probably would have assumed that he went down in the crash. No one would have looked for him.

He won’t, of course. There is something in his mind, a vein of annihilating fire so deep that he would almost believe his masters put it there if not for the way it contradicts his mission, that rises up whenever he looks at Steve. It shouts, _Protect_ , even though Steve is significantly bigger than him.

It shouts, _Want_.

He hates it, wants it gone. Wants Steve gone. Steve and his fucking photographs—Bucky would have overlooked the files completely in favor of eliminating targets. Kill or be killed. He is the Winter Soldier and there is no tenderness in him.

Steve, though, Steve had gone and spread his curiosity across the floor in the faces of Bucky’s victims, then had the nerve to look sad when Bucky didn’t recognize their faces. When he couldn’t remember eliminating each and every one of them, when he didn’t even know their names.

He’d thought—he’d thought that was it, that Steve had finally dug out the truth about him in those files. Steve is Good in a way that deserved capital letters; his Goodness lights up the world around him and casts the shadows in high relief. Whatever Bucky once was, he belongs to the shadows now.

So he’d touched, because—he doesn’t even know why. It was an idiotic thing to do in a combat situation. He’s seen sex used as a weapon before, and it had started out that way. Steve had acted so horrified before at the idea of them being lovers that it had seemed like the perfect way to hurt him, to push him far enough away that he would finally see Bucky as he is, not as he used to be.

When Steve had held that shard in his hand a part of Bucky had thought, _Yes. Yes, please_.

He feels the echo of it still—the wrongness of him still existing in the world. After a mission the asset goes to the chair. He hates it, but it feels _wrong_ to not be strapped in, the panels coming down over his face and the bite guard in his mouth.

Cryostasis was its own kind of death: alone, the lights going out, his heart slowing to a standstill. It can’t be that much different. He thinks it would almost feel familiar. Welcome.

Except Steve didn’t kill him and when Bucky had circled back, unable to leave without seeing Steve one last time, _one more time_ , he’d followed Bucky out of Ferrara then found a truck for the windy road through the Alps to Austria.

In the afternoon they stop for fucking sandwiches.

Well, Steve stops for sandwiches. Bucky sits in the car opening and closing his left hand—it’s started grinding, its fingers spasming unpredictably—as he watches Steve through the café’s front window. He hasn’t spoken all night and the idea of being around people right now, having to pretend to be human while the Winter Soldier breathes down his neck, feels insurmountable.

So he watches Steve talk to people and thinks, _What are you doing here, I hurt you, I shot you, I killed your friend, if you’re so Good then why are you still fucking_ here?

When Steve gets back to the truck he has a sack full of food and a couple of drinks stuffed under his arm. He climbs into the truck, shuts his door, sighs, and says, “Look, I'm—sorry for what happened. Last night.”

Bucky stares out the windshield at the collection of squashed bugs littering the hood of the truck. Steve is— _Steve_ is—? He looks at Steve's face in case that will make him less confused. It's solemn, determined. Not scared or hurt or betrayed or the things that Bucky thinks it should be.

He doesn't speak but his confusion must show because Steve presses his lips together then says, “I know you weren't thinking right. If you were, you never woulda done anything like that.”

“Like...what?” Bucky asks, still utterly, dangerously lost. He is the Winter Soldier. The sole purpose of his existence is to kill. He does things _like that_ all the time. (Not like that. Never like that.)

“Sex.” Uncomfortable doesn't begin to describe Steve's expression but he goes on anyway. “I didn’t mean to put it in your head with that damned kiss. I was trying to—well, never mind what my intentions were, I didn’t mean to give you the idea that it’s something we do.”

“But...I kissed you before. You said.”

“Once, after you’d been captured and tortured and drank enough Scotch to souse a horse. You weren’t thinking straight then and you aren’t now and Jesus, Buck, what kind of man would I be if I took advantage of that?” Bucky blinks, utterly thrown. Exactly who does Steve think took advantage last night? Steve continues unabated, “I just don’t want you to do something that you’re going to regret later, once you remember more about yourself. And about me.”

Everything about him is so sincere. Bucky searches his face, trying to find the same crack of falsehood that he did before—but it’s not there this time. It doesn't make any sense. Neither of them do: Bucky wants to protect Steve so he'd hurt him, and now Steve is really, sincerely apologizing to him for being hurt. 

Bucky goes back to staring out the front of the truck. The bugs make sense. They are squashed and remain squashed. They don't express their condolences to the windshield. Beside him, Steve clears his throat then gingerly sets Bucky’s sandwich on the console between them before starting the ignition.

Bucky should kill him.

He won’t.

 

\--------

 

Steve picks up a Russian dictionary and a German one.

The German files are mostly mission records—what worked, what didn’t. There are no failed missions: if they experienced a setback or the Winter Soldier was injured they would simply try again whether he was fully healed or not. There are post-mission photos and Steve forces himself to study the awful wounds that no man should have suffered, let alone survived, before he burns the pictures forever.

The Russian files—have medical records in them. They are incomplete; Steve thinks he may have left part of them behind in Ferrara and silently berates himself at the loss. It seems like the Germans inherited Bucky from the Russians, who found him in that godawful gully missing an arm but impossibly still alive and set to work poking and prodding at their find.

Their memos include a list of medications, brain scans that Steve doesn’t understand, and a litany of procedures—amputation, insertion of something called the _anchor socket_ , metal grafting along his collarbone and scapula, multiple mentions of _electrically-induced neural redirectioning_. Whatever that is, they did it to him thirty-five times in three years.

He finds another photo, less violent but even more unsettling than the others. In it, Bucky stands in a garden, completely naked and looking terrifyingly thin. They haven’t put the metal arm on him yet. His hair hangs to his jaw and his gaze is vacant, fixed somewhere to the left of the camera.

Beside him stands an unsmiling woman with gray hair, spectacles, and a matronly air. She barely comes up to Bucky’s shoulder yet her gaze, aimed straight into the camera lens, is as direct as it is inscrutable.

On the back is a faded, handwritten inscription: “доктор Breite и Потусторонний полный подлежит - Июль 1951.” That’s the earliest record of Bucky that Steve’s been able to find. He flips the photograph back over and stares at Bucky’s grainy, black and white face. Whatever they did, however they cracked his head open and scooped out all of Bucky’s flash and charm and fierce courage, they did it before 1951. The Bucky in the picture is lifeless, an overgrown doll.

That photo he tucks away into his pocket. It itches at him, both in body and mind.

He continues to pore over the files at night, while Bucky curls up in the backseat of the truck a few feet away. He doesn’t dare open the files in the daylight, not until he’s sure that they are bled of anything that could hurt Bucky.

The photographs of his victims have done enough damage. They’d reached down into Bucky’s mind and lanced something, an old infection that, while healed over once, has begun to bleed anew.

If his sleep before had been troubled, now it is virtually non-existent. Sometimes Bucky will twitch and thrash and cry out in languages Steve doesn’t understand; sometimes he will simply snap awake, wide-eyed and breathing fast. They spend two days in the truck, camping out in the big national park in western Austria, and Steve isn’t sure that Bucky sleeps at all in that time.

He doesn’t know how to ask about it. What happened in Ferrara is too fresh, the laceration in his hand still healing and his thoughts tangled up in guilt and shame and, horribly, lust.

God above, he can’t believe he let that happen. He’d noticed how Bucky mimics him sometimes, copying Steve’s gestures, using him to relearn how to be human. He should have realized that Bucky would pick up on—on Steve’s long-buried and half-forgotten stupid goddamned childish _infatuation_.

Steve throws down the pencil that he’d been using to scribble translations in the margins of the medical records and buries his face in his hands, his elbows on the picnic table. They’d spent the night on the edge of the park; in the valley below civilization awaits them. Bucky has taken over deciphering the Hydra code and is currently seated in the bed of the truck, working with a terrifyingly single-minded focus. He hasn’t spoken all day. For the past two days, he's avoided Steve as much as he can with while still not letting him leave Bucky's sight.

 _All right. All right. Get on top of it._ Despite all of Bucky’s girls, despite Peggy, there had always been some tiny part of him that wondered what it would be like and now he knows, doesn’t he?

Maybe he can finally bury it for good, and be the friend that Bucky needs.

-o-

Weeks on the road has left Steve with a thick beard. Bucky pulls on a beanie he found in the truck’s glove box and they descend on Uttendorf looking like a pair of mountain men.

There’s no Hydra base here, but they need supplies and Steve wants to buy some equipment, see if he can’t do something about Bucky’s arm. Of course that will mean talking Bucky into letting him look at the arm—thus far he’s hunched over it like a wounded animal—but one thing at a time.

They’ve barely been in town ten minutes, however, before Bucky starts looking over his shoulder.

At first Steve writes it off as Bucky’s usual discomfort around people, but he’s in the middle of fumbling through a request about screwdrivers with a store clerk when Bucky suddenly yanks him away hard.

He keeps yanking until they’re out the door and on the street, moving steadily. Steve gets his feet under him and tries to remember all of Natasha’s advice about how not to look suspicious. “What’s wrong?” he hisses out the corner of his mouth to Bucky.

Bucky doesn’t answer except to push Steve through a passing doorway and up the flight of stairs beyond. It’s an empty duplex, its walls stripped bare and dust on the floor.

The second they’re inside Bucky gives Steve a little shove to spin him so that they’re face-to-face. Bucky’s eyes are narrowed and hard. “Did you contact someone?”

“No. Why, who’s following us?”

“I told you what would happen if you ran,” Bucky says. His shoulders are squared, the way they looked as he strode through the Hydra base in Slovenia, as he stalked Natasha through the streets of DC, as he chased a bully with Steve’s blood on his knuckles out of an alleyway. “I told you what I would do.”

Bucky’s eyes are bloodshot. Steve tries to remember the symptoms of sleep deprivation; he’s pretty sure paranoia is up there. He begins, “Whatever you think is going on, I didn’t call any—”

The door behind Bucky flies open and a grenade whizzes past them to ping against the far wall, dropping to the ground.

Steve grabs for Bucky and Bucky grabs for Steve. They wind up falling to the ground in a tangle just as the grenade goes off—with a loud bang and a blinding light. A flash grenade, intended to stun and disorient rather than kill.

Steve blinks, struggling to see around the spots in his vision. Bucky is already back on his feet, though he’s swaying slightly and shaking his head. Hoisting himself up onto one knee, Steve fumbles for his weapon when he catches a familiar glimpse of red hair in the doorway. _Shit_.

“Don't shoot!” Steve teeters upright, his head still spinning. He’s a big target, though—in this case, a big shield. He stands up in front of Bucky and backs into him, arms spread.

There’s a long moment where everyone catches their breath. The gun in Sam’s hands wavers. Natasha’s does not. Steve doesn’t know if either of them are marksman enough to hit Bucky around him.

“Stand down,” he says, trying to inject his voice with as much calm authority as he can. “Everything’s okay. He’s not a hostile, don't shoot.”

“Steve,” Sam says. “He has a knife pressed to your jugular.”

Steve just barely manages not to turn his head, which probably would have sliced his neck open. “Yeah, that’s—it’s okay, he won’t do it.”

That statement is met with further silence, though it is by no means a quiet stillness. Multiple people are expressing their opinions non-verbally.

Then Bucky nudges at Steve’s ribs, guiding him sideways. They move across the room with Bucky keeping Steve between him and Natasha and Sam. The knife stays pressed against the side of Steve’s throat as they go. Sam lowers his gun but watches closely; Natasha keeps hers fixed in place, her expression blank.

They reach the window and the knife disappears. So does Bucky.

Steve sags against the windowsill for a long moment, fighting the urge to leap out after Bucky. He lifts his head and gives Sam and Natasha a weary smile. “I’m glad you’re both okay.”

-o-

They adjourn to the roof. Sam and Steve take a seat at a small metal table, perched on rusty chairs meant for children, while Natasha steps away to make a phone call.

“I feel like I should be angrier at you,” Sam muses, “but mostly I’m just glad you’re not dead. Nice beard, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Steve says. He’s got his arms folded on the table and his forehead resting on them. He is suddenly exhausted—now that he thinks about it, he’s not sure if he slept in the last two days, either. “And I’m sorry, for a lot of things. How are things in DC?”

“A goddamned mess. They’re still trying to lift the carrier debris out of the Potomac—it actually dammed up part of the river, flooded some houses in Anacostia. Last count was two hundred thirteen casualties total, though it’s hard to say how many were S.H.I.E.L.D or Hydra at this point. The bad guys tend to stop shooting once they’re dead.”

Steve chuffs a laugh then asks, “Fury?”

“Gone underground, still officially dead. Gave me a helluva recruitment pitch, but Natasha was a bit more persuasive.”

Steve lifts his head to look in her direction. She has her back to him. “On a scale of ‘one’ to ‘unilateral nuclear strike,’ how angry is she going to be with me?”

“Death Star. Wait, did you watch those movies yet? Never mind. She’s pissed. We, uh—your comm was still on when you fell out of the helicarrier.”

 _Christ_. Steve hides his face in his arms again. “You heard all that?”

“Hill did. She didn’t go into specifics but she was dead sure we’d find a body in the river, one way or another.”

“I’m sorry. Bucky didn’t want me contacting anyone.”

There’s a beat of silence as Sam absorbs that and Steve wishes he hadn’t said it. “How is he?” Sam eventually asks, his tone neutral.

“He’s—confused. He’s started to get some of his memory back but it’s spotty and it’s not all good. The things they did to him, Sam.”

“Yeah, we found the paperwork you left in Ferrara. He’s got a helluva arm.”

Steve bolts upright. “You have the arm schematics? With you?”

Sam lifts his eyebrows. “Back in the hotel room, yeah. If you want ‘em you’re gonna have to convince Natasha to give them to you.”

Looking over, Steve realizes that the lady in question has finished her phone call and is moving to join them. Steve rises and resists the urge to fall into parade rest. Sam gets up, too, and moves a discrete step away, either to give them the illusion of privacy or to avoid getting blood on his clothes.

“Interpol put an alert out three days ago for the Winter Soldier,” Natasha announces as she draws near. “All countries in the European Union have their border posts on the lookout for a man with the physical description of James Barnes. We didn’t give them his name but it’s probably only a matter of time before someone makes that connection.”

Steve’s chest tightens. Every second that passes presses a bruise deeper into his skin with the knowledge that Bucky could be moving further and further away, could be hurt, caught, or killed while Steve stands here. He holds his ground. “Is there anything we can do about that?”

“Potentially.” She folds her arms. “Start talking.”

Steve tells them his version of the last month, starting from the moment he woke up in Honduras. It isn’t until he’s relating a slightly-edited version of their trip out of Ferrara that Natasha interrupts. “I’m sorry, can you go back to the part where you two fucked hard enough to demolish a boarding room?”

Steve cuts off, his face going hot. Natasha might as well have asked him to perform a re-enactment; he feels suddenly, horribly exposed, braced for an attack that he isn’t even sure he understands. “With all due respect, that’s personal.”

“The hell it is,” Natasha says casually. Her expression is blank. Steve has felt less threatened by actual loaded grenade launchers. “I just spent the better part of a month searching for the killer of a man I considered to be my friend, a man I’ve fought alongside and risked my life for, only to discover two days ago from an irate and highly-judgmental _signora_ that my friend is not only alive, he’s too busy whipping his cock out and fucking his would-be killer to let me know I shouldn’t mourn his loss.”

Sam coughs delicately and ambles away across the rooftop, examining the clouds. Steve gives in and locks his hands behind him in the small of his back.

Natasha continues in that same terrifyingly level voice, “You’re just lucky it was me who found you and not Tony. You remember Tony Stark, don’t you? One of those guys who fought with us in New York? He took your death pretty hard, especially after he heard that he was one of the primary Hydra targets. He’d semi-retired, even destroyed all his suits, but from what I hear he’s started building a new one in order to fight Hydra in your honor. Thor—Thor left Asgard, the kingdom that he’s partially responsible for ruling, in order to help search for your body. Something about the need for a warrior’s burial. He managed to dig up your shield but nothing else.”

Steve has been _attacked_ by actual grenade launchers that were less painful. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. That means a lot.”

“I am. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to get a message to you. I was concerned with not spooking Bucky, which—” He waves one hand to indicate the city around them into which Bucky is disappearing fast. The bruise deepens; Steve tries not to show it.

“Were you more concerned with that than trying to stay alive? Don’t get me wrong, the recording Hill played for me was very touching. Romantic, even. I’m just impressed you managed to carry a torch for seventy years.”

 _It wasn’t seventy years for me_ , Steve thinks and desperately buries the thought. It’s stupid and juvenile and not the goddamned point; he can’t let Natasha make this about _that_. Taking a deep breath, he says, “I was trying to help a man I consider my friend, a man I’ve fought alongside and risked my life for.”

Natasha’s expression finally cracks a hair. That buys Steve enough breathing space to go on the offensive. “I’ve never asked you what you did before you came to S.H.I.E.L.D. That was your business, and I trusted you enough to not make it mine. I know that you went through something like he did, though, and that the only reason you’re here is because someone gave you the chance to change. I want to give him a chance, Natasha. I owe him that much.”

She studies him for a long moment, her shoulders rising and falling on a deep breath. “Answer me one thing,” she says eventually, “and I’ll call off the Interpol dogs. Were you two sleeping together back then or is this a new thing?”

“No, we—we didn’t, before. But it’s not new either. I’d thought about him like that, but it wasn’t like it is nowadays. I really did love Peggy and Bucky had his gals, so—it wouldn’t have mattered. Not that _he_ didn’t, Jesus, he meant everything to me, but.” He breaks off, pressing his eyes shut before admitting, “I don’t even know how to talk about this.”

When he dares to look again Natasha’s hard mask has softened. “If Coulson were here I’d owe him twenty bucks.”

“What for?”

“He said you were bisexual. I said he was projecting, but I should have known better than to challenge him on anything related to Captain America.”

“I don’t—I know that’s what they call it now, but that word doesn’t mean anything to me.”

She acknowledges that with a tip of the head. “Still, more accurate than what I wagered.”

“Which was?”

“Asexuality. I didn’t see how you could have a chest-waist ratio like that and not have wound up with a few out-of-wedlock babies or gay sex scandals.” Steve chokes and Natasha smirks. “I mostly said it to mess with Coulson.”

Steve absorbs that then announces, “Well, this has been about the most uncomfortable conversation I’ve ever had.”

“We can go for the record if you’d like.”

“No, thank you ma’am.”

-o-

They order dinner in and Steve could almost cry at the portion size. He hasn’t exactly been starving on the road with Bucky but it is a bit like that first good meal on leave. He eats enough pasta to make Sam stare in astonishment.

“You get used to it,” Natasha tells him, seated cross-legged on the far bed. “Do you remember that all-you-can-eat buffet in Toronto that had to order in from another restaurant because you ate all their quiche?”

Steve frowns. “I don’t remember that. The quiche, yes, it was delicious, but I didn’t realize they ran out.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “They were Canadian and too polite to deny you a menu item just because you’d already eaten six plates.”

Flushing, Steve mutters, “It was very good quiche.”

Sam snorts and nudges another box of fettuccini in Steve’s direction.

Natasha departs after dinner to meet with her Interpol contacts and redirect them towards Hydra targets. Steve had started nodding off after the first bite but sticks it out, determined to hear the rest of Sam’s sitrep.

He gets as far as Maria Hill going to work for Stark before his head dips too obviously. Sam cuts off, laughing. “Man, you’re done. Come on, you can sleep in ‘Tash’s bed 'til she comes back.”

“Don’t let her hear you call her that,” Steve mumbles. He can barely keep his eyes open. Sam gathers him up, slipping a strong arm around his waist like he’s some kind of invalid. Steve throws an arm around Sam’s shoulders in return, using the opportunity to give him an awkward squeeze of gratitude.

Because he’s a good guy, Sam doesn’t mention it.

-o-

When Steve wakes up it’s dark in the room and Bucky is there.

He’s crouched over Steve on the bed like one of Fuseli’s Nightmare demons. He looks the part, too; it’s started to rain and his hair is plastered to his forehead, framing his pale, thin face. His eyes glint in the dark. So does the knife in his hand.

He isn’t sitting on Steve’s chest, but Steve can feel a weight descend around his lungs all the same.

Across the room, Sam snores loudly. Bucky turns his head in that direction then looks back at Steve. _No_ , Steve mouths desperately. Bucky starts to move away—towards the window or towards Sam’s bed, it’s too hard to be sure in the darkness—and Steve grabs him by the shoulders, sitting up, and kisses him.

Under his hands, Bucky’s shoulders go rigid. It’s a wild shot in the dark: Steve’s got nothing else to work with here and no way of preventing Bucky from hurting Sam without this turning into a full-on brawl that could hurt Sam, as well. Besides taking down Hydra, the only thing that Bucky has given any indication that he wants is Steve.

So Steve gives it to him, pressing their mouths together for a long, frozen moment before pulling back.

Bucky backs down, easing away from the bed with his gaze flicking back and forth between Steve and Sam. Swallowing, Steve reaches for his bag, packed and ready to go, beside the bed.

Rain drums loud against the windows and the night air cools Steve’s skin as he follows Bucky out the window. He spares one thought for Sam, obliviously sleeping, and Natasha and the others, and that thought is: _Sorry_.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You need a shower,” Steve announces. “You look like a freighthopper.”
> 
>  
> 
> This chapter contains mention of non-consensual body modification, discussions of past dubcon, and body horror. Inspiration for the arm's design came from stereowire and this: http://stereowire.tumblr.com/post/80113775802/please-dont-ask-me-how-much-time-i-spend-thinking

“You need a shower,” Steve announces. “You look like a freighthopper.”

They’re holed up in Prague while Steve’s Russian friend works to distract Interpol. Bucky hates relying on a person who until recently was an adversary, but he can acknowledge the need to have someone on their side. He cannot fight S.H.I.E.L.D, Hydra, _and_ Interpol. Not and keep Steve safe.

He doesn't understand when that became so important to him. Maybe it always was.

That doesn’t mean he’s going to go along with everything Steve says without a fight. “It doesn’t matter what I look like, you’re the only person who sees me.”

Something like sadness passes over Steve’s face, there and gone again. He persists, “For now, yes. But I gotta tell you, Bucky, you look about as suspicious as a fellah can get. If I didn’t know you, I’d be calling the police to report some kind of vagrant in the neighborhood. What if somebody else does just that?”

It’s about the only thing he could have said that would make Bucky consider the idea. Steve probably knew that. He is learning fast.

He cajoles Bucky into the bathroom, where he trims first his own beard and then, hesitantly and after asking, “Are you sure?” twice, Bucky’s.

Bucky says yes as much to test himself as anything else. The idea of someone holding a sharp object anywhere near his throat...and yet he stands there and allows Steve to do just that, even turning and tilting his head whenever Steve needs a new angle.

After Uttendorf Bucky is beginning to think that neither one of them makes any sense when it comes to each other. Steve is Captain America and the enemy, and not that long ago Bucky had done everything he could to kill Steve, to complete his mission. The idea of anything happening to Steve now makes Bucky feel shaky and insubstantial, like without Steve he’d blow away on a stiff breeze.

Once he’s done Steve asks, “You want a haircut? We used to do that for each other. Well, first my mom did it for us both, but after she passed we’d cut each other’s hair. Think I remember how—I’m game so long as you don’t care too much about style.”

 _“This is ridiculous. I can’t believe_ I’m _the one cutting his hair. I’m a geneticist, not a hairdresser.”_

_“Hey, sweetheart, maybe if you didn’t come to work looking like a Farah poster, you wouldn’t have drawn the short straw.”_

_The woman scowls as she snips away another lank. Her own hair is immaculate and golden, curling away from her face in feathered waves. “It’s sexist. Don’t look at me like that, it is.”_

_“Ooo, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you’d complain about getting the cushy job. It’s a haircut.”_

_She stops cutting with the scissors and turns to face the man standing nearby. “I just don’t see why one of you geniuses can’t operate a hair clipper.”_

_“Crew cut’s too short,” says the older man seated in the doorway with his legs stretched out before him, crossed at the ankles. He doesn’t look up from his book as he speaks. “The sweat glands in its hair follicles get ice crystals from the cryochamber.”_

_“Then get someone who’s actually cut hair before. I don’t even know what I’m doing.”_

_“How hard can it be? Just get the ends out of his eyes. You’re not going for style points, here, it’s not like he cares what it looks like. Do ya, buddy?” The man leans down until his face is level with Bucky’s. Bucky is careful to avoid meeting his eyes, keeping his gaze just slightly lowered and to the left._

_“Hey.” The man in the doorway closes his book and the younger man twitches, straightening. “No talking to it. You know the rules.”_

_The woman shoots the younger man a barbed look as he backs away before she resumes cutting away chunks of hair of Bucky’s hair. “I did_ not _sign up to cut some zombie’s hair,” she mutters._

Bucky digs himself from the memory like it’s a grave. Each time it feels like it’s more of an effort, like they’re piling on. Burying him.

Steve has lowered the scissors but other than that he hasn’t moved. When Bucky meets his gaze, Steve quirks a soft, wistful smile. “No haircut, huh?”

Bucky shakes his head.

Steve fiddles with the shower, twisting the knobs and holding his hand in the stream. Bucky watches. He understands the mechanics of this just fine, doesn’t need Steve to know how to operate a shower, but there’s a ritualized aspect to this that fascinates him.

Once he’s gotten the water temperature to his liking, Steve leaves. Actually leaves, goes out to buy supplies that he says they need. It’s not the first time that they’ve split up but after Uttendorf Bucky is more aware of how easy it would be for Steve to slip back to his life. He has friends, some of whom come after him when he’s in trouble. He could be out there talking to them right now. The metal arm, Bucky’s one advantage, is compromised: all its fine motor units have shorted out and the best he can use it for would be a blunt instrument. They could come back while Bucky is naked, in the shower, and kill him.

They won’t. Well, they would, but Steve won’t let them. (He won’t let them hurt Bucky. He will come back.)

Bucky strips out of his clothes, wincing when they stick to wounds that he didn’t know he had. Small things, abrasions and lacerations that didn’t even register.

In the shower, he watches the water darken as it runs down his body. He’s so much more aware of himself than he was before. On a mission it never mattered if he was hurt and so there was no point in noticing whether he was in pain or not. Either he would survive long enough to get back to the techs or he wouldn’t and even then, their ministrations mattered a lot less than—than whatever made his body heal the way—than how he’d been—

_What did they do what did they do what did they make me into?_

He claws his way out of that grave with his good hand braced on the walls of the shower. Water pours down over his bowed head, droplets flicking away from his face with the force of his breath. By now it’s started to run clear so Bucky takes another minute to find his balance before he peels his hand away from the wall and picks up the tiny bar of hotel soap that Steve had dug out of his pack.

The first pass of soap raises questions. How did he get this knotted scar halfway down the right side of his ribcage? He probes it, noting the loss of sensation, before moving on. There are two round scars on his left thigh that look too small and clean to be bullet holes. An ice pick? Lasers? A large swath of discolored, hyper-sensitive skin covering his right hip and buttock could have been from a burn or roadrash. The metal arm he avoids completely, barely even touching the layers of scar tissue that spread across his chest and shoulder blade.

It’s strange that his body remembers what his mind cannot.

In the past, a shower was the last thing they did to him before they put him back in cryostasis. (Is that why he’s avoided taking one for so long now?) Besides the dread of the impending cold, it was always an unpleasant experience: too-hot water and rough hands scrubbing at him, turning his body whichever way they wanted. He hadn’t—it hadn’t mattered either way, of course, he was nothing, it was not important to give him clothes and why shouldn’t they touch him if they needed to?

He rubs the soap everywhere he can reach and wonders how, exactly, people washed their backs. Maybe they do that in pairs. Maybe Steve will come back in time to do that for Bucky.

A shiver of interest runs through him but that, too, has edges. Bucky focuses on reaching back as far as he can. There’s another scar alongside his spine; it comes to him, suddenly, that he’d been impaled. He stiffens, braced, but no jolt of visceral memory floods his mind. He stays grounded in his own body.

He does his legs, absently noticing that his prick is half-hard. That happens a few times a day, now, and more often than not he ignores it. No one will punish him, but Steve is around almost all the time and that is...complicated. 

This, the slide of his hands over his own body, is not. Alongside the scars he discovers places that feel good to touch; when he clumsily shampoos his hair he actually groans aloud at the sensation of his own fingertips rubbing into his scalp. The left side of his chest has diminished sensation but the area under his right pectoral is unexpectedly sensitive, halfway ticklish and halfway— _nice_. He runs a hand over his side and relishes the feeling of his prick getting harder. All of his senses are focused on this, on the patter of warm water on his skin and his own curiosity.

One finger dips into the crack of his ass and sparks another shiver. Which, okay. The fantasy-dreams about Steve have only ever given him snapshots so he knows that this is something people do but—oh, _hey_.

The pad of his forefinger rests against his hole, just barely sinking in. Bucky’s feet squeak against the floor as he widens his stance. Is this strange? He shits out of that hole, is this unhygienic? There’s soap on his fingers, though, so maybe—he’s just getting clean.

The soap certainly helps his fingers slide. He circles two around the ring of muscle, feeling its instinctive twitch and eventual give. His body has all sorts of involuntary movements and reactions, but he’s discovered that’s totally normal and not a symptom of something wrong with him. (Something they did to him.)

He bends one finger almost on accident and sucks in a shuddery breath, closing his eyes, as it actually goes into his body. His hole closes around it, clenching a little before relaxing.

There’s something in the back of his mind that isn’t quite instinct and isn’t quite memory saying _just a little deeper, just a little more_. When he obliges it Bucky grunts as his fingertips settle in a way that makes his legs shake. The physiology here escapes him but right now he couldn’t give a fuck.

He arches his back slightly, working with the awkward angle until he has two fingers buried up to the knuckle, rubbing against that particular spot. It’s almost too much, he has to back off every now and then to let himself calm down.

The water’s starting to go cold. Bucky doesn’t care, too focused on the throb of pleasure building up in him. It’s all he can do to keep standing upright.

Fuck, he wishes the frigging metal arm wasn’t screwed up right now. His dislike for it is secondary to his desire to get off and if he could just get a hand on his prick he’s pretty sure he would. As it is he’s rock hard, flushed a dark pink against the pale skin of his belly. He could press against the tile of the shower for friction but it’s too cold and this feels too damn good to stop.

If there was someone else here with him, if someone else, Steve, if Steve could wrap one big hand around his prick, and kiss his mouth again like he'd done in Uttendorf. If these were Steve’s fingers nudging deeper into him, if he was doing this with _Steve_ —

His brain shorts out. It’s less intense than before and he misses the chance to touch his cock because he doesn’t want to pull his fingers out of himself. It still feels amazing.

Leaning his forehead against the wall, Bucky pants. He likes that. That is a thing he likes. He puts it on the mental list he’s started to form, right below _things that are both sweet and salty_ , _medium-sized rooms with clear exits_ , and _blankets_.

Steve goes on and off the list. ‘Like’ is too simple a word for Steve.

Bucky’s still drying off when Steve comes back in, calling out as if he sensed Bucky’s apprehension. He sets a few things down in the main room then appears in the bathroom with an armful of clothing, frowning as he rips off price tags. “I hope these fit. They’ve gone and changed all the sizing charts—they don’t go by inseam anymore so I kind of had to guess.”

Bucky drops the towel to the floor and takes the underwear and trousers that Steve hands him. If he weren’t watching for it, he’d have missed the way that Steve’s eyes flicker down and back up.

The pants are soft but lack sufficient pockets for storage of weapons. Bucky keeps this complaint to himself and asks, “Shirt?”

“I was actually going to ask—I got some supplies and Natasha gave me the schematics of the arm. If you want, I could have a look at it.” He pauses and ducks his head, trying to catch Bucky’s gaze. “Only if you want, though.”

So he did meet his associates while he was out. Bucky feels the same stab of panic he had when he’d gotten to the city limits of Uttendorf and turned back with his heart racing and his mind a litany of _Steve Steve Steve_. He swallows it down. Steve came back. Or, well, he took Steve back and Steve let himself be taken.

It’s becoming a theme.

“You think you can fix it?” he asks.

“Maybe. It’d mean taking it off, though. From the look of the blueprints, the motor unit controls are in the inside of the shoulder socket and—”

“It comes off?” Bucky interrupts. “You can take the whole arm off?”

Steve looks a little taken aback but nods. “From the look of what Natasha gave me, yes.”

Bucky turns his gaze on the limb in question. He’d never thought—of course he’d noticed that it’s different from the rest of him, both in function and in nature. Other than pressure he has no sensory perception in that limb. Even the bullet that damaged the hand didn’t hurt.

It’s his biggest advantage in a fight. Except for the fine motor units in the palm and the back of the hand—which he’d known, he’d _known_ better than to take a bullet in that vulnerable a place, but it had been that or Steve—it is virtually indestructible. The plating on the upper arm is thick enough to deflect large-caliber fire and has.

If he takes off the arm then he is vulnerable.

But it’s the most obviously inhuman part of him, the most difficult thing to hide. If he takes it off—maybe, maybe he will feel more like a person. Maybe he will _be_ more like a person.

“Do it,” he says. He sits down on the corner of the bed, holding the arm out and looking up at Steve.

It takes longer than just wishing. Steve has to get his equipment together, pages of halfway-translated schematics spread out over the cheap polyester bedspread as he kneels at Bucky’s feet. He kneels there and he looks up at Bucky and says, “Are you sure?”

A huge formless thing rises up in Bucky. He wants to grab Steve’s hands and force them to work on him. He wants to grab Steve’s hands and put them on him in other ways. He wants to grab Steve.

He manages to nod.

It is an agonizing process. At first Bucky tries to keep track of what Steve is doing, seeking out the seams of hidden panels in the plating, but the pain level quickly erases his interest. Bucky had thought the arm was virtually numb, but he’s wrong: there are nerve sensors built underneath the plating that he never knew about until Steve slips and jams a screwdriver into them.

Bucky folds over his own lap, clenching his teeth on a scream.

Steve flinches backward. “Shit, hellfire, Bucky, I’m sorry.”

Bucky forces himself upright. Pain has never mattered to him before. It isn’t something to escape from; it simply is. _The asset accepts pain and does not ask for it to stop._

Ignoring the sweat on his own upper lip, he nods at Steve. “Keep going.”

After that Steve shuts his mouth and buckles down, working quickly and quietly and only pausing to consult the schematics. Bucky does his level best not to look at the arm but he can see how there are bits of it poking out in strange directions, like a half-assembled rifle. It never stops hurting and he feels himself shutting down, going to that quiet, empty place where he knows he can endure anything.

It hurts and it hurts and it hurts until suddenly, like a window breaking open, it doesn’t anymore.

Bucky takes a long, shuddering breath as cool air brushes against his side. There’s a strange feeling at his shoulder, like—swinging with a fist and missing, or landing on something too soft to hold his weight. An absence.

“Jesus, Bucky.” It’s said low and pained, as though Steve is the one having part of his body removed.

When Bucky peels his eyes open—when did he close them?—Steve is holding the metal arm in his hands like it’s a dead animal and staring at Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky looks too, half-expecting to see blood and exposed bone—but instead there’s a perfect ring of metal, an artificial socket built into his side. The ring is perforated; glancing at the arm in Steve’s hands, he can see ball of the socket and the small, sharp spines that lock it into place.

It is clean, neat, sterile. Bucky almost wishes there was blood and bone. At least then it’d be him, somewhere under there, but instead there’s just another piece of the machine wired right into the side of his torso.

He lifts his gaze just in time to see Steve turning his face away.

All of the warmth in Bucky’s chest left over from the shower shrivels up. He wants to reach behind him for a blanket, but he’d need the arm back for that so instead he rises to his feet with no idea where he wants to go except _away_.

Immediately he pitches to the right, almost smacking his head on the wall. The world feels slanted. No, he is. He hadn’t noticed the weight of the arm until now that it’s gone.

Steve catches him, his palm wrapping easily around Bucky’s hip. His skin is cool and dry. “Hey, easy. Easy.”

Bucky resists the urge to turn into Steve’s body. He waits until he finds his center of gravity and then makes himself step away.

Steve lets him go. “You okay?” he asks, his voice pitched low. “Sorry that hurt so bad, maybe we shoulda got you some Sco—some booze first.”

Bucky steps around him, careful, careful to neither reach for comfort nor lash out. Steve’s concern—his very fucking _presence_ is suddenly agonizing in a way that Bucky doesn’t know how to endure. If Steve touches him again—but he lets Bucky stumble, still listing to his right, across their hotel room to the balcony.

The air outside is cool and bracing. Their balcony looks out over the river—the Vltava, his brain supplies. Many bridges span the river’s width and large square buildings of an older era sprout along its banks, interspersed with modern towers; their flat rooftops make them ideal for a sniper roost. Clouds dot the blue sky. There is no breeze.

From across the river it would be an easy shot to kill someone on this balcony.

He sits and does not look at his shoulder again. He’d hoped—but that had been stupid, clearly. He wonders how much of him they cut out and replaced, how deep they went, if he could start ripping out metal pieces and never find the bottom.

Even if he dropped the arm in the river, he’ll never be free of them; he’d just have a giant empty metal socket in his side. He would still be broken and scarred and less than whole.

Not really human after all.

Stop. _Stop._ It doesn’t matter, it is not important, stop thinking about it. He cannot change what they did to him. He is theirs even now. Hydra’s thumbprint goes deeper into his body than he will ever be able to scrub away or remove with a screwdriver.

He’s slipping back into that empty space again, like a walking cryostasis. He feels the sun on his shoulders and the softness of the new pants Steve bought for him; behind him in the room he can hear the soft clicks and electrical sounds of Steve working on the arm. None of it means anything. It exists and he thinks nothing about it. He has no thoughts about anything. He is not in pain.

Be nothing. Don’t think.

-o-

“Bucky?”

The shadows have moved with the sun. Whatever Steve was doing, he’s finished. He stands over Bucky holding the arm. It doesn’t look quite so messy anymore, though a few panels stick up here and there. Its fingers hang limp, inanimate.

Steve’s big, so wide in the shoulders, yet everything in his posture is soft and non-threatening as he kneels at Bucky’s side. He says, “We don’t have to put it back on if you don’t want to.”

What does he mean? He took the arm off to repair it so that Bucky could use it again so that Bucky could complete his mission. That was the whole point of this, wasn’t it?

Steve’s eyes rove over his face, a furrow drawing itself between his brows. “You seemed really anxious to get it off. If you don’t want to put it back on, there’s nothing wrong with that. Or we could leave it off for a while, maybe the night?”

“The mission isn’t complete,” Bucky says.

The frown on Steve’s face grows. “There isn’t a mission, Buck. There’s no one saying that you have to do anything.”

A twist of anxiety penetrates the fuzz between Bucky’s ears. If he doesn’t have a mission then—then what is he doing here? The only reason that Bucky exists is to serve the mission, whatever that may be.

Steve starts to shift away—to take the _arm_ away—and Bucky shoots out his flesh-and-blood hand. His fingers close around the metal forearm and he has a sharp moment of confusion when he can’t sense the pressure of his own grip.

“What do you want to do, Buck?” Steve asks again. He looks helpless.

What does Bucky want? Other than Steve, who doesn’t want him back, who cringed at the sight of his body, he has no idea. He knows better what he doesn’t want: the chair, the cold. Without the arm he is useless. He can barely stand.

“Put it back on,” he says, twisting to face Steve. Taking a deep breath, he braces himself for more pain.

He needn’t have. The arm goes on a lot easier than it came off, just a pop and a twist. There’s a faint stab of nerve pain as the sensor spikes extend, locking the arm in place but other than that it’s agony-free. Bucky wouldn’t put it past Hydra to have deliberately made it extra painful to remove the arm, as a disincentive.

“Do you want to move it around?” Steve asks, sitting back on his heels. It sounds like his voice is coming through a pipe. When Bucky stares at him blankly, Steve flexes his own arm in demonstration. Bucky copies the gesture.

They take the arm through all possible motions, including the ones that Steve himself cannot make. The arm can go smoothly behind his head and swing around to the front again. Bucky had noticed the difference in range of motion between his arms before, but only in a vague way related to hand-to-hand combat. Now he realizes just how strange and alien it is.

Bucky watches the fingers flex and feels nothing. It’s part of him. There is no escaping this grave.

Except then a set of fingers close around the metal ones, touching gently. No one is that gentle to a machine. Bucky can barely feel the pressure of them and something about the light touch makes him the world come back into focus, all the sound and color turning up again. He’s sitting on a balcony overlooking the river. The sun is warm, a little prickly on the back of his neck. Steve sits next to him.

Steve eyes rest on Bucky’s face instead of his arm. “You okay?” he asks, voice as soft as his touch.

Bucky pulls his metal hand out of Steve’s human one and reaches out to rest two fingertips on Steve’s smooth cheek, as light as Steve touched him. He can do that. This is how people touch each other when they—

He sways forward almost involuntarily and Steve pulls back, darting a glance sideways at the street far below and at the empty windows around them as if he’s suddenly remembered the possibility of danger. “Bucky. Don’t.”

Bucky stiffens, his back going tight. He drops his hand; it clinks against the stucco floor of the balcony. “Why?” Steve had touched him, kissed him, why couldn’t he—? Unless he was doing it wrong, somehow, hurting Steve. He’d tried to be gentle, but the arm wasn’t built for that. He wasn’t.

“You’re,” Steve pauses to lick his lips. They look soft. They’d been soft, the two brief times that Bucky’s mouth had touched them. “I think you’ve gotten confused about things. I’m sorry, it’s my fault. Bucky, we...we were never like _that_.”

“But you’re what I remembered," Bucky says. His head still feels foggy and his voice sounds less certain than he feels. He tries again. “This feels right, in my head. It’s the only thing that feels right.” 

“It’s...it’s not, I'm sorry,” Steve says, his shoulders drawn up.

He moves as if to get up and leave. Steve is fast but Bucky is faster: he grabs the front of Steve’s shirt and pulls him back down. It’s too rough, Steve’s knees crack on the floor and Bucky winces, angry with himself. He’s doing this wrong again. He needs to make Steve understand.

“We already did it,” he says. He reaches out—with his human hand this time, just in case it made a difference—and rests it on Steve’s cheek. “You did.”

Steve’s still got that look on his face like someone’s pointing a gun at him. Does he think Bucky’s going to hurt him? It’d be understandable, considering what happened before, but Bucky is trying so frigging hard to act human right now.

“I shouldn't've done that.” Steve takes his wrists and peels Bucky’s fingers away from him, holding them in a grip that’s still gentle. He makes it seem so easy. “You barely even know me, so whatever you think you’re feeling, it isn’t real. I’m just the first guy who’s treated you halfway decent in—God knows how long. Until I helped you get out of the carrier and wouldn’t hit you back you were doing everything you could to kill me.”

That’s true. More than that, it’s an objective truth, verifiable by outside sources like the surveillance of Steve’s friends. In the confusion of the fight and the crash, Bucky can’t pinpoint the moment when his mission fell away and Steve— _protect, want_ —poured in.

Fuck, Bucky doesn't _want_ logic. Steve had kissed him and it’d felt good. Nothing else feels good in Bucky’s head, and he realizes suddenly that he has spent the last week desperately hoping that Steve will do it again. He has been good, he has let Steve leave the apartment to talk to his friends, he took a shower. 

Embarrassment follows the realization. To hide that, he demands, “Then why’d you do it?” 

Steve winces. “I...I was worried you were going to hurt Sam.”

For a second all Bucky can think is, _Who the hell is Sam?_ But it doesn’t matter, does it. The important part is, Steve didn’t mean it. He’d wanted something from Bucky and that’s how he’d gotten it. “Oh.”

Steve’s still holding his hands, looking guilty but also a little defiant. It makes sense. Bucky is dangerous. He’d threatened Steve's friends. (He hadn’t been going to actually hurt them. He thinks.) Steve had done what he could to protect them. The shriveled thing in Bucky’s chest dies a little more. 

The world is going flat again, gray and muffled. He pulls his hands away from Steve’s and gets up. It’s easy this time, his weight evenly distributed the way his body expects. Steve watches him, his brow furrowed with concern, so Bucky turns and goes back into the apartment to escape that gaze.

He goes into the bathroom because it’s the only place not visible from the balcony and turns on the tap. Once he does so, he realizes that he’s thirsty—but he doesn’t drink. He stands there watching water pour down the drain, his mouth cottony and tasting of rubber, and does not drink.

_“Please, please...can I have some water? Please.”_

_The asset does not decide when it drinks._

_“I’ll die. I think—I’m dying right now.”_

_That is not the asset’s concern. We will decide when it needs water and when it will die. Accept that._

_“I do. I swear I do. Please.”_

_The asset does not beg. It makes no requests and has no desires._

_“Okay. I’m sorry.”_

_The asset does not say ‘I’. It does not have the privilege of that word._

His mouth is wet, but not with water. He’s bitten through his cheek and the insides of his lips are coated with blood. It takes a long, long moment for him to convince his jaw to unclench and an even longer moment to reach out with the metal hand—the _thing_ attached to him, another thing—and turn the water off.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha calls on one of the two special cellular phone Sam gave to Steve when they last met. “You’re going to have eyes on you when you watch the border, but they’re only looking for one man traveling alone. That’s the best I can do.”
> 
>  
> 
> Alllll sorts of warnings for this chapter, guys. Dubcon, memory of physical and psychological torture, noncon body modification, mental breaks, PTSD-triggering, suicidal ideation, other stuff. More detail in the notes.

Natasha calls on one of the two special cellular phone Sam gave to Steve when they last met. “You’re going to have eyes on you when you watch the border, but they’re only looking for one man traveling alone. That’s the best I can do.”

“It’s good enough,” Steve tells her. “Thank you, Natasha.”

“Don’t thank me yet. If you make it to Altenberg call me on the other phone. If not, try not to give Interpol my name when they interrogate you.” She hangs up before Steve can reply.

Steve is tempted to call her back and ask if he even knows her real name, but restrains himself to smashing the phone as directed. Part of him recoils at the waste but after having spent two years learning the use of cellular technology, it has therapeutic benefits as well.

-o-

They travel along the border, searching for a less-occupied crossing. When Steve first suggests doing so, Bucky nods along and adds, “An explosion at one of the larger checkpoints should be sufficient distraction for us to cross someplace else.”

Steve says carefully, “I was thinking more about limiting the possibility of civilian casualties if there’s a fight.”

Bucky looks at him unblinking before redirecting his gaze at the map spread out between them. The corner of his mouth is tight.

Bucky drives. He’s getting the hang of non-combat driving and even keeps the car on the right side of the road most of the time. Steve mostly stares out the window. He’s brooding and he knows it; but it’s not like Bucky is going to call him out. Bucky has barely spoken to him all day.

Things haven’t been this awkward and strange between them since Steve first woke up to find himself a willing hostage. Bucky hasn’t tried to touch him again since that moment on the balcony, but it sits heavy in the long silences that neither of them break, in the way that Bucky has pulled back to the kind of physical distance that would be tactical if he didn’t regularly show Steve his back.

Steve isn’t sure if that’s a sign of trust or increasing self-negligence.

There’d be plenty of reason for it, probably more than Steve can even guess. The idea has been growing in his mind that part of the conditioning Hydra had inflicted on Bucky included— _God_ —sexual coercion. Part of his training, maybe, or just something they’d used to control him. Inside of his jacket Steve still carries that photograph he found, of Bucky standing naked in a garden beside the older woman. The image had unsettled him before, but now it chills Steve to the bone.

He doesn’t want to believe it but he also doesn’t know how else to explain Bucky’s fixation on this. Of all the things in their long history together, their boyhood and the war and those long nights in between when they’d stayed up talking to one another just to reassure themselves that they still existed...out of all of that, Bucky had latched onto something that never was. A daydream romance that, until now, Steve had thought only existed in his own mind.

There is always the possibility that Bucky—the one that Steve remembers, back then—had felt the same way...

No. Steve is not going down that path. It hurts too much. Even if it didn’t, it’d hardly be fair to the Bucky that exists now, the one who remembers next to nothing about the person he used to be, who still has not said one word to someone who isn’t Steve, who might have had horrible, unspeakable things done to him.

So that leaves them here: Bucky on one side of the car, silent and blank-faced, Steve on the other, too mixed-up in the head himself to be any good to his friend. What a damned mess.

Part of Steve wants to say to hell with Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D and all the rest, find some quiet place to stay and see if they can make a person out of the ashes left in Bucky’s head. But that hasn’t worked so far. If anything Bucky is getting worse, sliding back into the tense posture of a loaded weapon.

What they need is answers, however terrible those turn out to be. Whatever was done to Bucky, Steve can’t help until he knows more and since Bucky’s even less inclined to split up than Steve, they’re going to have to find those answers together.

Altenberg may give them some. Running through the files they liberated from the Hydra base in Slovenia are frequent references to a ‘training facility’ somewhere near the city; when Steve went to Bucky with the possibility, he dug through the coded missives he’s been deciphering from the Moroccan relay station.

There was only one: a brief message sent from DC to a location six clicks southeast of Altenberg, requesting a status update on something called ‘the twins.’ The Altenberg location gave no reply.

If someone else is being held there and subjected to the same treatment as Bucky then this might turn into a rescue operation. What Steve will do if it does, he has no idea. He can barely handle one amnesiac assassin.

-o-

Normally traveling between two EU countries would be no problem, barely a cursory check of passports, but after the events in Washington, the revelation of Hydra’s return, and the Interpol alert, manpower was beefed up at the border crossings. Of all places in the world, Germany remembers the evils of Hydra and has done more than most to stamp it out within their borders.

Unfortunately, today that’s working against Steve and Bucky.

A river divides the two countries. Steve would vote for swimming across and stealing new transport on the other side, except every satellite and surveillance camera is fixed on the area right now. Unless they want to be on the run from Interpol and probably a few intelligence agencies with axes to grind against the Winter Soldier, they need to pass through the border without raising any red flags.

Steve spent their last night in Prague making passports for them both, using the templates that Natasha left for them inside an abandoned mailbox. They dump all of their guns outside of town and drive in slowly, Steve at the wheel this time.

In front of them, the road splits into three lanes, divided by temporary concrete buffers. This is a small town, unused to high security risks. Steve almost feels guilty for taking advantage of their naiveté.

“Just act normal,” Steve tells Bucky as they idle in line. He winces almost immediately. “I mean. Just act calm. We’re—we’re on leave.” The passports Natasha suggested were for US military personnel, which are plentiful in Germany. “We were sight-seeing. Camped in the Alps, went to Prague to see the castle there, now we’re going to go look at the ones in Germany. There are tons of castles in Germany, we’ve been to them before, got our picture taken in front of one. I think that one wound up in a history book somewhere.”

There’s silence from the other side of the car. Then, “We went to castles as who we were, or who we are now?”

Steve shifts his grip on the steering wheel, straightening out his fingers then curving them again. He tries to keep his expression relaxed, not sure if the surveillance cameras can see them from four cars back or not. “The people who we’re supposed to be are going to see castles.”

Ahead of them, people are stepping out of their cars and allowing them to be searched, presenting their passports and speaking with the guards. Bucky’s voice is low. “Are they going to ask me that?”

Steve licks his lips, says, “You, we’re soldiers. You’ve been through something bad, a bad firefight, and you lost your arm to an IED. What you’ve got now is an advanced prosthetic prototype, but try to keep it still. Act like the fingers don’t bend much, okay? You have battle fatigue. We’re taking some R&R to get your head screwed on right.”

Bucky absorbs that. The car inches forward. “What about you?” he asks.

“I’m your friend. I’m trying to help you get over losing your arm, and the shellshock. We’re in the same unit.”

The car in front of theirs rolls through the checkpoint and a woman in a yellow reflective vest beckons them forward. There are two people performing the passport checks and searching the cars; Steve sees four guards wearing combat gear and carrying M16s in their vicinity, two others visible in the other lanes.

They get out of the car when directed and walk a few feet to the side. The woman in the yellow vest begins to search their car, checking under the seats and scanning along the bottom with a mirror on a long stick. Her coworker, a tall thin man in thick glasses, smiles with professional cordiality as Steve hands over their passports. “American?”

“Yep!” Steve smiles. “We hear you’ve got some castles ‘round here.”

The checkpoint agent doesn’t quite roll his eyes but it’s close. He says, “On vacation?” His gaze travels between Steve’s face and his passport photo, then Bucky’s passport photo and his face. Pauses there.

“We’re gettin’ a little R&R,” Steve tells him quickly. “Been a rough couple of months.”

That seems to mollify the agent. He goes inside the building with the passports to scan them. Hopefully they’ll work the way they’re supposed to: Natasha described them as self-generating databases that contained miniature robots—or something along those lines. Basically they were supposed to create their own files instantaneously in the checkpoint computer. That is, if Natasha and Steve had both done their work right.

The border agent checking over their car opens up the driver door and Steve catches a brief glimpse of he and Bucky in the reflection of the window. They are both standing stiff and silent. Steve winces internally, forcing his spine to relax and pulling his lips up into a smile.

“I’m gonna put my arm around your shoulders,” he tells Bucky. When Bucky’s only reply is a sharp, confused look, Steve goes ahead and slings one arm over the back of Bucky’s neck, pasting a wide grin on his face as he does so. It’s a familiar gesture: they used to do this all the time, Bucky back when he could pick Steve up in one go, and Steve once he could do the same in reverse.

There is a picture—or there was at some point: it may have been lost to time, if the archivists didn’t get their grubby mitts on it—of two boys, both missing teeth, young enough that there was no major difference in their height. They both have their arms around each other’s shoulders, beaming happily for the camera.

Steve checks out the guards from the corner of his eye. Only one is looking in their direction. Ducking his head, Steve murmurs, “You with me?”

“Castles,” Bucky says. His hair obscures his face in a tangled curtain. They should have tied it back.

“Castles,” Steve agrees. The hand that’s slung around Bucky’s shoulders is closed into a loose fist. Steve spreads his fingers slowly, letting them rest on the sun-warmed fabric of Bucky’s jacket. It’s strange how that changes the gesture, crossing the line from friendly roughhousing to something intimate. “We’re friends. We’re going to Germany to get you some R&R, help you get better.”

“I’m not gonna get better, Steve.”

“What?” Bucky says nothing and Steve can’t duck his head without being obvious, has to keep smiling to maintain the appearance of a friendly conversation for the guards. “Bucky—”

“All _gut_ ,” the male agent says, coming out of the office with their passports. Steve jerks away from Bucky. It’s pure reflex, instinct to cover over the moment of intimacy.

It’s so stupid. The sharpness of his movement make a couple of the armed guards turn their heads. The border agent pauses then hands over their passports, speaking to his coworker who is finishing up her inspection of the vehicle. She nods, joining them.

“We need to do patdown and then you are clear,” the female agent tells them. “Please empty pockets into here.” She offers them a small plastic bin.

The male agent is putting on blue sterile gloves. Steve takes the car keys out of his pocket, along with a knife that he hopes is small enough not to raise eyebrows. He wants to glance over at Bucky but doesn’t dare. “Wow you guys have really beefed up security since the last time we went through.”

“ _Ja_ ,” she says, widening her eyes and letting her shoulders slump for emphasis. “Is long day.”

“Well I hope you getta break soon,” Steve says.

She laughs a little as she takes the box of gloves from her male counterpart, who steps over to Steve. “Please put arms on your head.”

Steve laces his fingers together on top of his beanie, letting the male crossing agent begin the process of patting Steve down. Should he chat more? Would that make him seem nervous? Damn, he wishes for Natasha right now.

“Please empty your pockets,” he hears the female agent say. “Sir?”

Steve looks over quickly. Bucky is staring at the female agent, his hands unmoving at his sides. “He’s—” Steve stumbles then regroups. “I don’t think he has anything in his pockets.” When the female agent looks between them Steve tries, “He’s got a prosthetic arm, too, the left. Lost it in combat—this is the first time he’s had leave in a while.”

Thank God the woman seems to catch on, because she sets the plastic bin down and says, “Put your arms on your head, please?”

“Please turn around,” the male agent says to Steve. He does so, keeping his hands in position. With his back to the agent and the guards, he lets his eyes slide over as far as they will go.

In the corner of Steve’s eye, Bucky stands still and rigid. He gazes straight ahead as the border agent puts her hands on his shoulders, on his sides, on his legs.

“Turn, please,” the male agent says, smiling politely when Steve obeys. “All _gut_. You have 30-day travel visa, if you want extend your stay please contact the American embassy.”

“Okay. _Danke_.” Steve tucks away the keys and knife and passport, and walks back to the car. He struggles not to run.

They get into the car and the thin wooden barrier gate rises out of their way. The border agents wave them through.

Steve keeps it at a crawl until they are well away and then lets out a long breath as he accelerates. No doubt they’ve been picked up on a half-dozen watchlists: the self-contained passport databases work for local checkpoints but the larger networks will pick up on the glitch. They’ll review the security camera footage and someone, somewhere will see Bucky. Or Steve. His face is every bit as recognizable, if not more.

For now, though, they are still moving. Natasha has contacts in Germany and if Steve can convince Bucky to trust them, using their safe crossing as evidence—

He glances sideways mid-thought and finds Bucky hunched forward, his eyes closed and his hands curled into fists.

“Bucky?” Bucky sucks in a huge gasp of oxygen, like he hasn’t been breathing this entire time. “Bucky!”

Steve pulls over to the side of the road in a spray of gravel and spinning tires. That only seems to make it worse, as Bucky curls up defensively and begins to pant in earnest, sucking in oxygen faster than it can escape.

Steve throws the car into park then sits there with his hands up, hovering. He knows vaguely what this is. When he first went to work for S.H.I.E.L.D he’d had a run of psychiatric holds, before he figured out what to say and what not to say in the mandatory evaluations. They’d asked him if he ever felt overly anxious for no reason and Steve had wanted to say, _This whole world, everything new and strange and fast and loud and bright, is a reason_. That, though, fell squarely in the category of ‘things not to say.’

This isn’t even the first time that he’s seen Bucky do this. It had never happened before Bucky shipped out—back then, breathing difficulties had been Steve’s province—but once they’d reunited in Europe Steve had noticed the times when Bucky would stumble away from the others to stand by himself, staring out over the snowy fields or empty forests with wide eyes until he got hold of whatever ran rampant in his mind and turned back with a shaky grin.

He’d—he’d actually done this that night he’d kissed Steve. Not right before the kiss, but before the Scotch. The memory’s a little sketchy, probably from all the times that Steve has shoved it away into a box and wrapped the box in barbed wire, but now that he dares to take it out in the light of day, that might have been the reason that Gabe gave Bucky the Scotch in the first place.

Steve hadn’t actually been there when it happened. He couldn’t remember what he’d been doing but he’d come back to camp to find Gabe clapping Bucky on the shoulder and Bucky examining the bottle’s label far too closely.

Bucky had always been careful with his drunkiness, never treading too close to the footprints left by Steve’s father, but that night he’d done a fairly good impersonation. Steve hadn’t touched a drop but his stomach had been in knots anyway as he’d dragged Bucky back to their tent, lecturing him in whispers about discipline and how he couldn’t be seen to play favorites with the men.

“I am your favorite, though,” Bucky had slurred, leaning heavily on Steve’s shoulder. And then, softer, against Steve’s mouth, “You came to save me.”

Steve doesn’t have any Scotch and Gabe Jones is long gone by now, buried next to his wife. He puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder awkwardly, uncertain whether to keep his distance. “Bucky. Hey, Buck, it’s okay. We’re a-okay. You did good, we got through fine.”

He keeps up a litany of soft murmurs until Bucky’s breath stops sawing in his throat and his muscles unwind seemingly one at a time. That leaves him slumped against the dashboard, his face leaving wet smudges on the gray plastic.

When Steve touches the back of his head, Bucky turns it until his cheek rests on the dashboard. His skin is pale, clammy with sweat. His eyes are closed. His lashes clump against his cheekbones.

Steve moves to pick hair out of Bucky’s face, a joke on the tip of his tongue about hair clips, when Bucky turns his head just slightly and kisses Steve’s palm.

Steve freezes. Bucky doesn’t seem to notice, content to nuzzle against Steve’s hand and huff a sigh. He kisses it again and the soft press of his lips is like a hammer striking at the anvil of Steve’s core, sending vibrations out through his whole body.

Maybe he makes a noise or twitches in reaction. Whatever gives him away, Bucky blinks his eyes open. For a moment they’re unfocused, vulnerable—but then they shutter hard, defenses flying up. He jerks away, leaving Steve’s hand to hover awkwardly in the space between them.

Steve licks his lips and tries to find his voice. Bucky beats him to it. “Don't do that,” he says. He’s sitting up straight in the passenger seat, his hands resting flat on his knees.

“What?” Steve says.

“ _Don't_ ,” Bucky repeats. The life has gone out of his face, leaving his profile blank. He stares at the road ahead of them as unmoving as a mannequin. If he still feels anxiety or any other emotion, it doesn’t show. For a moment, when Steve touched him, it’d seemed to help; but this, the blankness, is almost worse than panic. 

Steve flexes his hand. The two spots where Bucky kissed him feel—different. Not hot or cold or wet or anything else, but he is so physically aware of them that there must be some sensation left behind. If he reaches out again, will the blankness fall? Or will it turn into something even more awful?

He puts his hands back on the steering wheel, swallows, and turns on his blinker.

 

\--------

 

They wind their way up into the hills, slowing down to a crawl on switchback paths. Bucky gets motion sickness like he always has and suppresses it the way he always has. Once, he knows, he’d been on a mission to kill someone on a boat in the North Pacific; he’d hidden in the target’s quarters for eight hours while they navigated the boat through a typhoon. Bucky had gotten so nauseous he’d actually thrown up in his mouth and had to swallow it back down instead of leaving any trace.

He doesn’t remember the target’s face or name but he remembers the misery of the experience. The technicians hadn’t seen fit to erase anything further than was necessary.

The further they travel, the fewer signs of civilization show along the sides of the road until it is just them and one set of power lines. Finally Steve pulls off into what seems like a forestry road, some dirt-packed path that barely fits their too-small car.

He parks it amongst the trees and they both listen to the engine settle.

They leave the car on one side of the ridge—Bucky quickly wipes it down for prints while Steve watches—and travel the rest of the way on foot. There is something very familiar about running through the woods with Steve that tells him he’s done it before. He can’t remember it at all but his body remembers Steve’s, knows how to fall in step with it.

A sense of calm falls over him. They are on a mission. All he has to do is follow Steve.

They go over the top of the ridge and down the far side. The trees thin out and there is a steep drop onto a level ground. Ahead of them stands a large house, the terrain around it artificially flattened by human hands. The house overlooks a valley—a strategically sound vantage point, if someone was thinking about that in the process of construction.

The house is three stories tall and square. Judging from the many windows and chimneys it was built before...Bucky loses track of time in his head but he knows that means the walls will be vulnerable to explosive rounds.

They approach slowly, circling the whole building once before emerging from the trees to creep their way in through the garden. Bucky approves of the tactic: it’s full of overgrown hedges that, while easy to shoot through, provide ample cover on their approach to the house.

Even before they reach it he knows there will be no one home. The air has a stillness that he understands as absence. Not a long absence—there has not been enough time for mold to grow, but he knows not to expect resistance.

Of course there may still be traps and so he proceeds slowly, edging in front of Steve as they near the house.

The front walkway is covered in orange rocks that crunch underfoot. Bucky is so preoccupied with trying to minimize sound that he doesn’t realize Steve has fallen behind until he’s almost to the main entry, a pair of ornate double doors.

Turning back, Bucky finds him facing the garden that they just emerged from. He has a small rectangular piece of paper in his hand—no, not paper. A photograph. Bucky is too far away to see what it’s a picture of, but Steve looks back and forth from it to the garden several times before he makes a noise under his breath that might be a curse and shoves the photograph into his pocket.

-o-

However old the basic construction of the house had been, there are clearly spaces within that have been renovated several times for electricity, for internet, for security, and other modern amenities. Many rooms have been closed off, towels pushed along the bottom of the doors and plastic sheets draped over the furniture; others, particularly on the southern side of the house, have obviously been lived in until very recently.

The sheets of the master bedroom smell of human skin; hairs litter the pillows. There are toiletries in the lavish bathroom. In the kitchen a bowl of fruit has sprouted mold, collapsing inward. A study in the front of the house yields a hunting rifle and a revolver from a locked closet and several files that were clearly left behind, but other than that they encounter no sign of Hydra.

Steve, who has been staying very close to Bucky throughout their exploration of the house, finally relaxes his stance. He’d taken the hunting rifle; it is old but well-cared for and currently their only long-range weapon. Bucky itches to take it from him and set it against his own shoulder.

Once Steve is convinced that no hostiles are present they make their way back down to the kitchen. Most of the food has gone bad—Bucky would estimate that whoever lived here left the house three, maybe four weeks ago—but water still pours from the faucets and electricity has kept the refrigeration units cold.

Bucky pours two glasses of water and finds crackers in the pantry, unopened cheese slices in the refrigerator. Steve watches him put the food on the high counter between them then comments with a faint smile, “Think that’s the first time I haven’t had to wrestle you into eating.”

Taking a seat on a high stool and popping a stale cracker in his mouth, Bucky doesn’t answer. He’s memorized the rate of Steve’s metabolism and knows that jog through the woods will have left him feeling peckish.

Steve steps away—not far, still within line of sight in the large dining room with its grand table—to call his friends. Bucky stays at the counter mechanically eating crackers with cheese and lip-reads Steve’s half of the conversation. Apparently their crossing at the border has been detected and Interpol is on the lookout for them both. Steve asks if they know it’s him yet and looks grim at the answer he receives. Someone on the other end makes a suggestion that Steve rejects with a _No_ that is audible from where Bucky sits.

If he concentrates Bucky can imagine the other side of the conversation as well. The complexities of human interaction are still a mystery to him, but he thinks it’s the red-haired Russian on the other end of the line and she is somewhat more understandable. She thinks strategically, logically, and while she has proven herself loyal to Steve to the point of death, she will still not allow his feelings or hers to cloud her judgment.

She has likely told Steve to allow her and whatever organization she has backing her to take Bucky into custody. It’s a logical move, possibly the only one that Steve can make. They have the remnants of both Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D looking for them; Bucky can only remember pieces of his missions but he can guess without really having to guess that most intelligence agencies would like to eliminate him as well.

Or gain him as an asset. Steve says that’s what happened before, when he changed hands from the U.S.S.R to Hydra. Bucky vaguely recalls a time when he went to sleep in one place and woke up in another thousands of miles and half a decade away. It hadn’t made much difference to the course of his missions, other than an improvement in the types of weapons and tech.

It wouldn’t make much difference, now. Would it? (Would it?)

Steve moves to rejoin him, his face tense and unsmiling. “Natasha says to hole up for a while. There’s an operation going down tomorrow in Cottbus—the people she works with thinks that’s one of the main Hydra rally points. Interpol thinks you’re heading there.”

Bucky drinks a mouthful of water, watching as Steve does the same. “And you?” he asks.

Steve’s mouth twists. “Natasha’s doing her best to convince them that I haven’t switched sides.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything. It’s a stupid conclusion to make if you know Steve, but there are a lot of people in the world who don’t.

“Anyway,” Steve goes on, sweeping crumbs from the countertop as he speaks. “Can’t say I’ll be sorry to stay. Whoever lived here musta been a real mucky-muck.”

He carries the crumbs to the sink and dusts his hands off before turning on the water to wash them down the drain. Watching him do so, Bucky is struck by—what he thinks is fondness. Only Steve would clean up after himself in some kind of oversized Hydra mansion.

Catching himself, he pushes the feeling away. He’s not supposed to feel that. Speaking of which...

“Steve,” he says, waiting until Steve looks at him. “I’m sorry. For—after the border crossing. I don’t know why I did that.” That’s a lie; he knows. He can’t tell that to Steve, though. Bucky can’t keep exposing the flaw, where what’s inside Bucky’s head doesn’t match what Steve thinks should be there.

Steve is shaking his head and Bucky repeats desperately, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Steve says. “It’s not—you don’t have to be sorry for that.”

They both stare at each other like they’re waiting for an answer. Bucky knows what he wants from Steve— _what do you mean, why is it okay now when it wasn’t before?_ —but can’t imagine what Steve wants from him. He thought he’d known but apparently he’d been wrong? He keeps silent rather than screw up any further.

Eventually Steve looks away, his shoulders hiked up. All of the calm steadiness he carries within him has vanished, the way it always does whenever they talk about this, and Bucky thinks that maybe he should have ignored what he did, pretended it never happened.

He thinks he’s running out of chances to get it right.

“Think I’m gonna grab a shower,” Steve says, his tone slightly strained. “You’ll keep an eye out?”

Bucky nods and Steve props the rifle against the counter before leaving the room, shucking his jacket as he goes. Bucky looks away from the sight of his shoulders moving under the stretched-tight fabric of his shirt.

His hands are in fists and Bucky consciously relaxes them, watching the movement of the tendons in his still-human hand. The metal hand whirs.

If he is logical, if he doesn’t let his emotions or Steve’s get in the way, he knows he should let Steve go. Or leave him—at this point he thinks it would have to be the latter, because Steve is stubborn as hell and probably wouldn’t _go_. Hydra wants them both dead but Interpol and the others want _him_ and the longer Bucky stays the more danger he puts Steve in.

Their being together serves no purpose, anyway. Bucky had been hoping to discover why he had Bucky Barnes’ face, but all they’ve found are dead ends and things he never wanted to know.

The obvious alternative is to go back to what he was before, an empty weapon. Back to the chair and the cold. The idea makes his breath short again and Bucky has to squeeze his eyes shut, think about Steve upstairs, the way he smells and the stupid kindness in everything that he does, so that he doesn’t panic.

That’s wrong, though. Steve has made it very clear he doesn’t want Bucky to feel that way about him, to use him as shelter. (Hasn’t he? He’d acted that way but it'd been a trick.) Steve wants...Bucky doesn’t know what Steve wants. Probably to have his old friend back, but Bucky’s beginning to think he never was that person to begin with.

That, too, is the most logical explanation. He doesn’t remember being James Barnes, not except for flashes of memory more fragmented than sand and a fixation on someone that he shouldn’t be feeling. Even if Bucky Barnes had secretly been in love with his best friend, why the hell would _that_ be the one thing he remembered when everything else had been scrubbed out of him? 

It’s more likely that he’d imprinted on someone who’d been demonstrably unwilling to kill him. Survival. Kill or be killed. Or...save and be saved, he guesses. 

Even if he did somehow put together enough pieces to pass as a human being, what would he do now, in a world still scarred by the things he’s done? Go to work for Steve’s friends as a different kind of weapon? Go on trying to act like the person he isn’t?

There is—

There’s a voice underneath the floor.

Bucky can’t tell what it’s saying, if it’s male or female, or even what language it’s speaking. It isn’t Steve: the sound of his footsteps is still upstairs, treading between the master bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. The voice definitely comes from below, though he can’t quite tell where. Bucky tips his head. There is a small space underneath the kitchen that, judging by the half-filled racks of bottle, served as an extensive wine cellar. He’d checked it himself and found it empty. There had been no other obvious entrances to the underside of the house, nor any indication of other rooms below.

Rising on silent feet, he moves out into the hallway. The voice grows more distinct. It’s a woman. Or the recording of a woman: the tone and pacing of her words sounds more like a recitation than a conversation, and there is a flat quality to the sound.

Upstairs the shower turns on, a faint creak of pipes and water, and Bucky drops to a crouch, straining to still hear the woman. She’s still so muffled that he can barely make out the broken pieces of words. It’s Russian. A Scandinavian accent of some kind tilts the edges of her vowels.

He follows the faint sound of her voice past the ornate landscape paintings that line the hallway. It doesn’t seem to be fixed to any one point, instead rising up out of the floor all through the hallway. It must be coming from multiple sources spread throughout the basement or whatever sub-level there is beneath his feet. A speaker array, maybe, or a broadcast booth.

Crouching down again, Bucky runs his eyes down the length of the hallway. The floor is hardwood, covered by a long throw carpet that stretches the length of the hallway. The grand entryway has many windows and faces west; the light from that end of the hall stretches shadows over the paintings and doorknobs...and an almost-imperceptible dip in the carpet about halfway down the hall.

Rising, he toes at the uneven place. A glance at the walls shows no obvious split but when he puts his flesh hand against the sideboards at the base of the walls Bucky feels a faint breath of air against his palm. There is something down there.

The recording continues. He thinks it might have gotten louder. Despite that, he still can’t hear what she’s saying, as if it’s been muffled somehow. The almost-words itch at his mind, right on the edge of comprehension.

He stands with his toes touching the depression in the floor, listening to the woman go on and on. He turns his head to the right and there is a picture of three young women in a garden—the garden outside, with its rows of hedges that have grown heavy with neglect. In the picture they are straight and neat. (In his mind they are somewhere in between.)

The three young women stare out of the painting with placid, milky expressions—except there is something strange about the middle girl. Her face has an odd sheen, almost as if the paint had not yet dried even after all these years.

Reaching out, Bucky touches the girl’s face with his forefinger. It feels like glass.

Immediately something shifts in the floor at his feet. Taking several quick steps backward, Bucky slips out his knives and watches as the wood paneling sinks. It tugs the throw rug down with it, one end whipping from the end of the hallway. The mechanism is old, creaking with age and disuse. The sounds it makes, too, are familiar to him.

He wants to back away further, get Steve and leave this place, but he can’t. His body’s gone tight, muscles clenching up and refusing to obey him. He has that feeling again like he’s just outside of himself, helplessly watching a flight of stairs appear in the ground before him.

The stairs are narrow, leading down into blackness. The light from where he stands only penetrates a few feet into the passageway, revealing cobwebs and concrete. The woman’s voice grows in volume but it isn’t coming from the darkness: like released gas it slithers up the newly-made stairs to curl around his ankles, gripping him tight. The knives fall from Bucky’s trembling, nerveless fingers.

The voice rises up over his body, repeating the words he knows in his bones until he can hear them everyone, coming out of his own mouth—

_The newsreel ends and the projector goes blank. In the absence of its solemn narration, the only sound in the room is Bucky’s too-fast breaths._

_“It’s not real,” he whispers. His throat hurts, either from dryness or his own screaming._

_“{It is,}” replies Breite. She’d move her chair so that he could watch the newsreel from his place on the floor, but now she slides it back and takes a seat. Bucky lowers his gaze; they’ll hurt him if he doesn’t. Well, hurt him_ worse. __

_At first he’d refused to bow his head, had met their eyes defiantly, but then they’d strapped him down and done some kind of operation on his shoulder without any anesthetic. Bucky doesn’t know what they did; there’s a big bandage covering the place where his left shoulder should be. He does not remember what happened, if he lost it or they took it off. His other hand is chained behind him to his ankles, keeping him on his knees. Other than the bandage, he is naked. He has been naked since they brought him to this new facility, and to Breite. He does not remember where he was before._

_He thinks the operation should have killed him. It’d taken a long time, long enough that he’d passed out from the pain and woken up again to repeat the cycle twice over._

_After that he’d started keeping his eyes on the concrete floor whenever someone speaks to him. Lately that’s just Breite._

_“{It is real,}” she tells him. On the edges of Bucky’s vision, her ankles cross over one another. He thinks she is fifty, maybe fifty-five years old, petite, with graying brown hair. She only ever speaks to him in Russian but she doesn’t seem to have any problem understanding him when he replies in English._

_Bucky doesn’t remember when he learned Russian._

_“{He saved millions of lives,}” Breite goes on. “{The bombs on board the plane would have killed most of the American coast. Johann Schmidt was an ambitious man.}”_

_Her voice is quiet, never rising. Some of the others have shouted, screamed in his ears; they had put him in a cell with some kind of magnifying horn that emitted high-pitched noises and static in bursts. Bucky had thought he’d be able to handle psychological torture, no problem, but after three days he’d been huddled in the corner with his palm pressed over one ear, sobbing and shaking._

_After that, her small and steady voice had seemed welcome. He knows it’s a tactic but it still feels better._

_Usually it does. Not anymore._

_“{It took a long time for the American people to accept as well. They had hoped he might survive, but as you saw, they have come to recognize the truth and mourn him.}”_

_Bucky shakes his head. The ends of his dirty hair hang in his eyes, matted with filth and blood; it’s growing out. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here. It feels like forever. “That was fake. You staged the whole damn thing. He isn’t—”_

_She sits forward in the chair and he can’t stop himself from cringing, trying to curl away from her. The chains pull tight and keep him in position. She has never raised a hand to him, never done anything other than sit with him and talk, but it is becoming instinctive now to anticipate violence. To expect it._

_That, too, he thinks should have killed him long ago. But here he is, healing every day just to take another beating. He thinks they always come at the same time, but without a clock or a window he can’t be sure. Time has lost all meaning in this place. He’d tried to mark down what he thought were twenty-four hour periods, but he’d been taken out of his cell for an operation and when they’d put him back the walls had been marked hundreds of times over._

_The faces of the guards who come to kick him around are bored, disinterested. At first they’d been lit with the familiar sick excitement of bullies presented with weak prey; but Bucky has long since stopped trying to fight them when they come, and after so many days they clearly view it as a chore rather than a party. It’s starting to feel that way to Bucky, too—there are only so many punches a guy can take before he stops noticing._

_Yet all Breite has to do is shift in her chair and he’s shivering, desperate to get away._

_“{He is not coming,}” she tells him. “{No one is coming. There will be no rescue mission. This place, Hydra—it is the asset’s only world now. The asset will not leave this place unless Hydra wills it so. Accept that.}”_

_The chains rattle with the force of the shudders traveling through his body. There’s a strange roar growing in his ears, loud enough that he actually looks around for its source before he catches himself and fixes his eyes back on the ground. In his mind the newsreel plays again: a solemn procession through the streets of Brooklyn, the casket covered with an American flag and Steve’s picture standing nearby._

_He wouldn’t believe it—except Steve would do that. He would do exactly fucking that, given a plane full of bombs and a lot of innocent people in harm’s way. He’d lay down his life in a heartbeat, dumb sucker that he is, because he’s never managed to believe that his life meant a damn, no matter how many times Bucky stepped between him and the bullies, shot down the men coming up at Steve’s back, gave Steve his own life—_

_“He isn’t dead,” he whispers. Something hot touches his cheek, trickling down to his jaw; it takes him a moment to realize that it’s a tear. His skin is so cold—he hadn’t realized how cold he is._

_“{He is,}” Breite says, cutting through the roar in his ears. “{Accept that.}”_

_He sobs. His lungs are still bruised from today’s—yesterday’s?—beating and it feels like he can’t get enough oxygen. The roar grows until it fills his head, shaking his bones. It leaves him hollowed and numb, an empty naked thing huddled on the floor at Breite’s feet that can’t stop crying._

_Eventually he runs out of tears. In the blurred periphery of his vision, Breite’s ankles have not moved. “{Kill me?}” he whispers brokenly. “{Please.}”_

_“{No,}” she answers, her voice utterly unchanged, pitiless. He closes his eyes. “{Death is a mercy and the asset does not ask for mercy. Its death, like its life, belongs to Hydra, and Hydra will decide both. Accept that.}”_

_His vision’s gone dark, like the prelude to a blackout that won’t close in all the way and instead leaves him feeling dizzy and disoriented. His legs and arm have gone numb from kneeling in this position for so long._ All _of him has gone numb. “Please...”_

_“{The asset does not speak unless instructed to.}” She pauses, then prompts, “{Repeat the words.}”_

_It’s been his one remaining act of defiance, small and pointless. There is a litany of phrases that she wants him to repeat every time they are together. Sometimes he hears them in his cell and isn’t sure if there’s a hidden speaker or if he’s going insane. He’s never repeated them back. He’s not—_

_She shifts in her chair. He can’t find the energy anymore to flinch away, to even feel the panic. His voice, when it rasps out of him, is barely human. “{The asset—does not. Speak. Unless...instructed to.}”_

_She does not congratulate him. She offers no praise. She sits back and says, “{The asset obeys commands at all times. Repeat the words. Accept them.}”_

_“{The...the asset obeys commands at all times.}”_

_“{The asset does not ask for food or water. It will eat and drink when Hydra chooses. Repeat the words. Accept them.}”_

Her voice fades slowly. The walls shift but stay the same. He’s on his front, huddled with his forehead pressed into the dusty carpet.

It can’t have been too long: the shower is still running upstairs and very faintly he hears Steve moving around, the faint squeak of his bare feet on the tile. He could probably run the water all day and not have it go cold, but Bucky knows instinctively that he’ll keep it short enough to fit an old, leaky water heater.

He’s moving before he even thinks about it, forcing his stiff muscles to unclench by force of tattered will. His body feels old, like the cryosleep never happened and seventy years have descended on him all at once. His eyes won’t focus. Things flicker in the corners of his vision and he tries not to look—

He gets to the bathroom door, has to put his hand on it for a second to be sure that it’s real. The door is, but his hand shines with metal. He wants to rip it off. It’s in him, he’s it, and the thought sends him groping along the wall to the shower. It’s a huge, walk-in shower, as large as the flophouse room that he and Steve shared after—

Steve has his back to him and is obliviously rinsing shampoo out of his hair. Suds flow down over his thick shoulders down over the curve of his ass, the thick columns of his legs. Water sluices in the dip of his spine. His skin, washed clean of the grime, is smooth and perfect, his body having healed what the world, and Bucky, has done to him.

The seventy years haven’t changed him: he is still whole and beautiful, the personification of strength and Bucky thinks, _You wouldn’t have done it. You would have been stronger. You would have fought them, and if you couldn’t have fought them you would have been good enough to make them kill you. You were always_ better.

Everything wavers around him again and Bucky reaches out, grasping for reality. When his hand touches Steve’s shoulder Steve jumps, spinning around to catch Bucky’s elbow and wrench him off balance.

It’s pure instinct, conditioning, that makes Bucky spin in the direction of the pull, sweep Steve’s feet from under him with one leg. Steve cartwheels rather than going down and lands in a fighting stance, his back heel against the wall of the shower.

The expression of stalwart determination on his face gives way to surprise. “What—dammit, Buck, you spooked the hell—”

Bucky crowds him back against the wall of the shower, setting one hand in the center of his chest and taking hold of his jaw with the other. It’s not violent exactly—not on the scale of things that they’ve already done to one another—but Bucky is very conscious, suddenly, of his clothes and boots and jacket, and how Steve is not wearing any of those things.

Bucky lets his grip on Steve’s jaw tighten to the point of cruelty. “Fight me,” he growls.

Steve doesn’t. He ignores Bucky’s fingers digging into his skin and blinks water out of his eyes, staring at Bucky. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Fuck you. You won’t—you never fight for yourself. You jumped Jackson goddamned Carver when he said something mean about his own girl, but you never save _yourself_.”

Steve’s eyes go wide, fill with the kind of awful hope that he’s never learned not to believe in. “You remember that? Bucky—”

Pivoting, Bucky hooks one leg in Steve’s and neatly slams him to the floor.

“Yes I fuckin’ remember!” Bucky shouts in his face when they land. “I remember you charging out there like bullets wouldn’t touch you and every time I had to go after you. You never got scared and I, I felt like such a fucking _coward_ for wantin’ to go home but I had to keep you safe because you _never! Fucking! Did!_ ”

He has one forearm locked across Steve’s bare chest and the other fisted in Steve’s wet hair. He uses that grip to shake Steve, his teeth gritted. Steve sets his jaw, grabbing Bucky by the shoulders.

“Bucky—it’s okay. Take a breath, you gotta calm down.”

Bucky laughs, wild and hysterical to his own ears. He tries to pull away and sit up but Steve tightens his grip. “Let me go,” he snarls.

“No.”

Rearing back, Bucky aims a punch at Steve’s face with the metal arm. Steve yanks his head to one side and the fist cracks through the tile floor of the shower. “Fight me or lemme go!” Bucky howls.

“ _Why_? If you remember then why do you want me—?”

Bucky answers with an elbow to Steve’s sternum. They grapple on the floor of the shower, the water still pouring down on them; at some point Bucky’s boot knocks into the metal stand in the corner, and an inordinate number of hair and body products tumble down. Steve’s naked, wet skin is difficult to get a hold on, but he’s hampered by his clear unwillingness to seriously hurt Bucky, who grits his teeth and does his best to force the issue.

They wrestle to a standstill. Steve gets him in the kind of vicious leglock that Bucky wouldn’t have expected him to know; he’s left Bucky’s hands free, though, and Bucky has to fight a war every second not to put his thumbs into Steve’s eyes.

“Fuck you,” he chokes. “Fuck you, why won’t you—”

Steve kisses him.

It’s a borderline-painful clash of teeth and lips, barely lasting long enough for Bucky to jerk his head back. Steve still has him in the leglock, so he can’t go far.

“You don’t wanna do that,” Bucky says. It’s a warning. He’s balanced on the knife-edge between who he used to be and what he’s become and instead of going one way or the other it feels like he might just split down the middle, his bones and teeth turned into the kind of shrapnel that not even Steve could survive.

“I don’t wanna fight you, either,” Steve snaps. “So how about we both knock it off?”

“No,” Bucky says, and resumes kissing Steve with all the ferocity of an attack, biting at his lips. If Steve wants to ruin this then Bucky will take it to the ground, grind it to nothing, and set fire to the dust.

It takes Steve a startled moment to respond, as if he really thought Bucky wouldn’t call his bluff. Bucky doesn’t wait for him to catch up, just plows straight over Steve’s clumsy, closed-lips kissing and twists his head sideways to get his tongue in Steve’s mouth. After a surprised grunt and a couple awkward scrapes of teeth Steve starts giving as good as he gets—never willing to back down from a fight, even one that could break him forever. Especially those.

It makes Bucky want to push, hard, show Steve what happens when you’re too good for a bad world. Breaking away from Steve’s mouth he scrapes teeth along that stubborn, square jaw—always looked so weird on a skinny kid—and sets to bruising the hell out of Steve’s skin, this time with his mouth instead his metal fingers. Steve winces and gasps as but doesn’t try to twist away even when Bucky breaks skin, leaves a pair of half-moon marks in the shape of his teeth imprinted on the firm skin two inches above Steve’s nipple.

When he drops his mouth to the nipple itself Steve tenses up, skittish as an alley cat. Bucky doesn’t want to gentle his attack but he can’t help it, leading with lips instead of teeth. He’s glad he does: when he kisses the flat ring of pink skin, letting just the tip of his tongue flick at the nub, Steve makes a noise like he’s dying.

Bucky lifts his head. Steve looks a bit like he’s dying, too, eyes closed and mouth open, expression overwhelmed. Bucky traces a line up Steve’s abs to his other nipple, pinching it between forefinger and thumb; Steve practically throws him off, he arches so hard. “Bucky, _Jesus_ , don’t do that!”

“Why?” Glancing down, Bucky notes that Steve has gone hard, his cock twitching every time Bucky rolls the nub of his nipple between his fingers. “You like it.”

Steve’s hands, which previously had been pressed flat to the shower floor as if he’d intended to just lie there and take it, shove Bucky away from his chest. “That’s not—it doesn’t matter if I like it. You don’t owe me that.”

Bucky stares at him, momentarily frozen. Does he really—Steve’s been pulling his punches from the beginning but this—he really does intend to just lie there and take whatever Bucky wants to do to him, whether it’s kill him or—

Rage burns away the gentleness. “Fine,” he spits, and turns away.

It takes a second of hunting through the plastic bottles that litter the floor—he doesn’t even know what half of these things _are_ , much less how the human body could possibly need all of them to get clean—before he finds some lotion. Steve props himself up onto his elbows, watching warily.

“Gonna fuck you,” Bucky tells him. A full-body jerk runs through Steve. “You ever do that? You ever let some guy bend you over and screw you six ways from Sunday?”

“No.” There’s a shake in Steve’s voice, but he has that ‘stalwart determination’ expression again. Like letting Bucky fuck him is his next great, noble mission. It makes Bucky’s teeth grind together.

For weeks now Bucky has been clinging to Steve like a toddler with a teddy, afraid of the dark. Right now, though, there’s nothing that he wants more than to break him in half.

He settles for pushing Steve onto his back, hiking one of his legs up, and shoving two fingers into his ass.

Steve flinches. His eyes pinch shut and his mouth falls open on a thin, breathless noise. Bucky grins, perversely satisfied.

_The asset does not_

No, no. Shaking away the voice, he fixes his attention to Steve, to where he is clenched tight around Bucky’s metal fingers. Belatedly Bucky wishes that he’d used his other hand; he can sense pressure but little else. He wants to know what Steve feels like, if he’s as warm on the inside—but fuck what he wants, this isn’t about that.

He sets to working Steve open, methodical and relentless as the Winter Soldier always is. For his part Steve mostly squirms on his fingers, his bent leg jerking in Bucky’s grip. His hard-on’s flagging and that won’t do. Bending down, Bucky presses his tongue to the shaft of Steve’s prick. It tastes faintly of soap.

“Bucky,” Steve croaks like he’s surprised. He gives a bit, his body relaxing around Bucky’s fingers.

Bucky sucks tiny kisses around the base of Steve’s prick then up its whole length until he can flick his tongue under the protective curve of foreskin. It plumps out against his lips, filling with blood. “You like this, huh?” he says, low and mean. “They shoulda sent someone to fuck you, get you on your back before they knifed you in the ribs. Bet you’d let me do anything I want to you right now.”

“Yes. Yeah.”

The guttural honesty surprises him into lifting his head, looking up past Steve’s torso to his face. His chin is tucked into his shoulder so that he can look back. The water has left his hair in damp spikes and his face has gone blotchy along with his chest.

Deliberately keeping his mouth near Steve’s prick, Bucky pulls his lips back from his teeth. “You want it that bad?”

Steve's generous mouth tightens up like whatever words inside it taste bad; at the same time Bucky can see him straining to get them out, fighting with himself and losing. His eyes are more honest: the color in them has darkened, pupils dilating until they swallow up the cornflower blue.

_The asset does not make eye contact._

Bucky jerks his gaze away. The words, _repeat them_ , the words are rising over his tongue and he puts his mouth back on Steve’s prick to muffle them.

He sucks Steve until he’s hard and shuddering, until Bucky has three metal fingers buried in him. When he takes them out Steve makes another sound, this one less painful and more plaintive. “Buck—”

The shard of Bucky that’s full of memory wants to slow down, wants to ask Steve if he’s okay, if it’s okay to want this. It’s too small of a piece. He releases Steve’s leg, lets it drop to the side of his own hips so that he’s in the V of Steve’s body, and scrabbles with his fly.

The wet material of his underwear clings to his prick as he undoes his pants. Bucky’s distracted enough by the process of peeling it away that he misses Steve moving until he’s sitting up into Bucky’s space. He tenses, but Steve only hesitates before slowly reaching out until his fingers bump against Bucky’s, holding his cock in a loose grip.

The breath in Bucky's lungs stills. He can only stare while Steve, his face still showing that inner struggle, gets Bucky's prick into the palm of his hand, holding it there and frowning slightly like it's a strange object he's found under a rock. He gives it a slight tug then looks so frigging surprised when Bucky groans, his hips rolling.

“You don't want to,” Bucky chokes. It's not a warning this time.

Steve lifts his eyes. Bucky closes his own rather than look away but it still makes shame rise hot in his throat. He can't even fucking do that much, can't pretend to fight the conditioning and act like a—

A gust of warm breath, too close, is the only warning he gets before Steve's lips touch his. Bucky keeps still, his bravado shattering; he knows he's hunched, wound up like a spooked animal, but he can't make his body relax. Steve kisses him slowly, carefully, and he tugs Bucky's cock slowly, carefully.

It shouldn't mean this much, just another thing that someone is doing to Bucky's body, except for how he's shuddering with want, straining to follow when Steve breaks the kiss to breathe.

_The asset does not feel._

“What?”

Bucky opens his eyes. Steve is staring at him, brow wrinkled, like he heard—the words, repeat them, say it—

 _No nonononono_. Steve heard, he can see, he’ll know what they did. What Bucky let them do. He knocks into Steve, pushing him back down like if he touches enough skin he’ll grow a new one of his own, one without metal or scars. Steve goes because he hasn’t figured it out yet, but he will. He’ll see what Bucky really is—human face stretched over a thing full of broken glass.

Not a person. Not anymore.

And he _let_ them do it. Bucky coughs a sob even as he gropes for the lotion bottle one-handed, keeping the other palm pressed flat to Steve’s chest. Steve’s hands slide around his wrist, rise up to touch his chest and his shoulders through his wet shirt, comb through his hair even as Bucky slicks himself up, like Steve is learning him through Braille. Bucky wants to tell him to stop, he wants more time before Steve finds out the truth, but the words won’t come. He’s already falling back into that thing, Winter Soldier, asset, what little scraps of identity he’s woven together unraveling around him until all that’s left is what he had at the beginning: Steve, and how much Bucky wants him.

He tries, he _tries_ to be careful as he nudges his prick into Steve but he’s shaky and clumsy with need. The only thing guiding him is the hot clutch of Steve’s body, the way he gives and gives too much.

Steve’s palm touches Bucky’s jaw, cradling his head. It’s too much like the chair, panels coming down over his face, and Bucky lets go of Steve’s hip to claw at his arm, his shoulder, his chest, anything to keep from falling down, down, down into the black cold and the voice that’s beating at him.

Legs settle against his sides, holding him up. Steve is holding Bucky against him, keeping him anchored. Bucky clings to that fixed point with everything he’s got. _Please don’t let me go, please don’t let me go—_

“I’m not,” Steve pants. “I won’t.”

Bucky flinches away and Steve grabs him, hands on his shoulders and long damn legs wrapping around Bucky’s hips, drawing him in, pulling Bucky’s prick deeper into his body. It’s all heat and pressure and this weird shock of—of closeness. Bucky sobs again, tries to get his arms under him. He’s trembling so hard his elbows won’t lock.

“Bucky,” Steve says. He flexes his legs, rocking them together. He’s bigger, stronger, but Bucky could still fight him if he weren’t crumbling. If his own body wasn’t moving on its own, sense-memory and animal need taking over.

_The asset does not have needs._

Somehow, despite the growing roar in Bucky’s mind and the continued beat of the shower against the progressively-sodden back of his shirt, they find a rhythm. That, too, is sense-memory: the fracture of memory currently coalescing in his mind tells him they’ve never actually done this before, and yet his body _knows_ Steve’s. Knows the way it moves, knows how to fall in sync with each breath and gesture.

Bucky’s hair is in his face, slapping wetly against his skin every time he thrusts. He keeps opening and closing his eyes, too overwhelmed to look at Steve’s face and too afraid of the blackness in his mind that rises up to swallow him every time he doesn’t.

Steve—Steve keeps looking right at him, his mouth open and taking in deep gulps of air. He’s flushed all over, down across his chest. He’s got one hand fisted in the back of Bucky’s shirt, tugging him in to every thrust like he wants more of what Bucky’s doing to him, like this isn’t—

“Bucky,” Steve says. He keeps saying that, or “It’s okay,” or “I’ve got you.”

The closer he gets the worse Bucky shakes, until he has to plant his elbows on either side of Steve’s head and tuck his face against his neck like the coward he is. Underneath him Steve arches up to meet his body.

When he comes he bites Steve’s neck, one last halfhearted attempt to convince him. Steve only settles a palm against the back of Bucky’s head, holding him there like he’s some kind of goddamned vampire.

Which he is—he’ll suck everything out of Steve, ruin all the good and _human_ parts of him.

And Steve, he realizes, will let him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky regains some lost memories about his time in the Red Room, which includes physical and psychological torture, hearing about Steve's death, and begging for his own; following this he has a mental break and assaults Steve non-sexually. Steve turns it sexual in an effort to calm Bucky down and they have a sexual encounter that neither of them has consented to.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s still dark outside when Steve wakes to find his arms wrapped tight around wadded-up pillows.
> 
>  
> 
> Warnings for a suicide attempt, discussions of suicide, and panic attacks in this chapter. See notes at the end for more details.

It’s still dark outside when Steve wakes to find his arms wrapped tight around wadded-up pillows.

They’d gone to sleep on the floor, only because Bucky had resisted lying down on the bed. After—after everything...he’d gone slack as a discarded puppet, lifeless except for his thin breath and the shivers that wracked him despite the warmth of the shower.

Steve was the one who’d gotten them off the shower floor, peeled Bucky out of his clothes, and wrapped him in a quilt taken off the master bed. Bucky hadn’t responded to questions but had allowed Steve to move him where he wanted and only put up a fight about the bed, pushing off the mattress with such an expression of fright that it might as well have been filled with spiders instead of down. 

Now Steve yanks on a shirt and some boxers before hurrying out of the master bedroom, calling Bucky’s name. All of Bucky’s meager belongings are here: his clothes still lying sodden on the bathroom floor, his knives, the printout of code from Morocco, his boots...if he’s left the villa he’s done it stark naked, which Steve could believe, and unarmed, which he can’t.

Steve winces slightly as he descends the stairs to the first floor of the house. He can still feel the ghost of Bucky inside of him, an unfamiliar soreness that aches in the best, guiltiest way; he feels raw all over, hypersensitive and ginger with his own body in a way he hasn’t been since the serum.

On the main floor of the house, he draws up short, staring. The floor of the hallway has opened up, descending into a staircase that leads down into some kind of sub-basement. It’s a short space; Steve has to hunch his shoulders as he descends. Most of the bare light bulbs have burned out, and the few that remain cast the rooms in a faint reddish glow.

Straight away he can tell that it’s a prison of some kind, with a row of holding cells along the far wall. There’s equipment strewn about, shelves of drugs and syringes, things that Steve doesn’t know the use of and doesn’t want to.

He moves forward on automatic, his heart pounding. The floor underneath his bare feet is cold and dirty. The red lights flicker. All sound from the world above drops away as he moves further from the stairs—soundproofing, most likely. Around him the air feels stagnant and far too still, and Steve finds himself holding his own breath.

The holding cells are bare concrete except for the glass observation windows that have grown murky and stained with age. Despite the cobwebs waving in the edges of the room he can tell that the first two cells have seen recent use: there are a few crumpled blankets and the smell of human waste.

The third cell is empty. Steve moves on to the last and peers through the murky glass.

Bucky’s sitting against the far wall of the cell, his knees drawn up. He’s still naked and he’s got the revolver shoved in his mouth, his finger on the trigger.

The whole world goes blank and soundless for a second and then Steve is kneeling at Bucky’s feet, the skin of his knees bleeding and his hands stretched out. “No no no, Bucky, don’t—”

Bucky’s closed eyes tighten. There are tear tracks on his face. He says something around the muzzle of the gun that might be, “Go away.”

“ _Please_ ,” Steve begs, his voice cracking. He makes himself lower his hands, put them on Bucky’s bare feet. His fingers slot between the tendons of Bucky’s toes and he strokes at them unconsciously. “Whatever it is, whatever you remembered here, I swear we can make it better.”

That gets Bucky to open his red-rimmed eyes and take the muzzle out of his mouth but it’s only so he can glare at Steve and say, “No you fucking can’t. You can’t change what’s already happened. Just—go away.”

“I can’t.” It’s Steve’s turn to shake, his whole body shuddering in the force of stalled adrenaline. Bucky’s still got the gun pointed at his own head and Steve doesn’t think he could get to it in time. All of this body’s strength and speed and he doesn’t think he can do this one thing. He settles for wrapping his fingers around Bucky’s knobby ankles, hanging on tight. “You’re everything, you’re it, I can’t go anywhere else.”

“Yes you can. You thought I was dead for seventy years, just—just put me back in the frigging ground.” Bucky closes his eyes, lets his head fall back against the wall behind him. “It’ll be better for everybody.”

“Not for me it won’t. Please don’t do this to me.”

He inches his hands up Bucky’s legs, stopping short when Bucky reopens his eyes. He’s crying again. So’s Steve. “But I hurt you,” Bucky whispers, small and broken in the dark cell.

Steve swallows hard and slides his palms up to Bucky’s knees. The gun’s maybe two inches from his right hand. “Not this bad. This’ll be the worst thing you could ever do to me. Please don’t do it.”

Bucky’s silent so he goes on. “I know they did horrible things to you. They made you into someone that you never wanted to be and they made you do horrible things, too. But you’re still—you’re you. You’re still in there. You’re everything and I love you. I lost you before and I can’t do it a second time, Bucky, please. I—I won’t come back from this.”

Straightening out his fingers, he lets the tips rest against Bucky’s knuckles. He’s holding the gun with his metal hand and it feels cold. Steve’s close enough now, leaning over Bucky’s drawn-up legs, that he can see goosebumps dotting Bucky’s chest.

“C’mon,” he whispers, so quiet he’s almost mouthing the words, “c’mon, c’mon, please. Please let me have it.”

For a moment there’s nothing but Steve’s murmuring voice—and then the whir of machinery as Bucky relaxes his grip. Steve eases the revolver out of his hand with all the care he’d give to a newborn or a bomb then sits back on his heels and wrenches it apart. He can’t even make himself disassemble it properly, he just grasps it by the stock and the barrel before using every ounce of strength to crack it in two.

Throwing the two pieces to the far sides of the little cell, Steve releases a great gust of breath and hooks his hands back on the tops of Bucky’s knees, bowing his head until his forehead rests there, too.

Bucky sits still and lets Steve sob for a while. Eventually he says, “That was one of our only guns,” in a dazed, vacant voice.

“I don’t care,” Steve replies thickly. “I’ll fucking break them all. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.”

He straightens in time to see Bucky pull his hands back, like he’d been reaching for Steve’s head but thought better of it at the last moment. 

He’s Bucky. More like the Bucky that Steve remembers, anyway, and for the first time Steve realizes that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. He’s the Bucky that came back from Zola’s lab, damaged and barely keeping it together, angry in a secret dark way that Steve didn’t quite know how to ask about.

Steve’s too shaky to try now. He feels as if the serum has finally quit and he’s reverted to his old fragile body again. Slowly he eases to one side until he’s sitting with his back against the wall next to Bucky. Together they stare out over the floor of the empty cell.

“Is this where they kept you?” Steve asks. It’s probably the wrong thing to talk about. He has no idea what he should say or do. He feels a little bit like he’s floating. Shock, he thinks. He’s going into shock.

Bucky’s stopped crying, though he makes no move to brush away the tears still drying on his face. He sits with his hands resting against his legs, apparently unconcerned with his nudity or the chill in the room. He nods. 

“So do you...remember everything?”

“I dunno.” Bucky draws his legs up a little more, curling into himself. Steve wants to wrap arms around him but doesn’t know if he should, yet. If he should at all. Move or don’t move? Speak or don’t speak? What would make anything better? “I remember who I was here, but I think...I’d already started to forget things.”

“Do you want to leave? We’d have to abandon the car, probably, but we could walk—”

“Leaving’s not gonna change anything.”

Steve swallows, wipes at his nose with the back of his hand then grimaces at the dampness. “Could we...go upstairs at least? It’s cold down here, you gotta be freezing.”

Bucky closes his eyes but lets Steve coax him to his feet.

He follows Steve upstairs into the dark, empty house and shows him how to close the hidden stairway. They go further up to the master bedroom, where Bucky obediently puts on the clothes that Steve chooses for him then stands there with dirty feet and his head cocked, silently asking, _Well?_

Move or don’t move? Speak or don’t speak? Steve doesn’t know how to handle this but there’s no one he can call for help. Natasha is in radio silence until the Cottbus operation goes through, probably another two days at the least, and Steve doesn’t have a way to contact anyone else. His cellular phone has no one else’s numbers in it and all the computers in the villa are secured.

“Let’s eat some breakfast,” he says and takes them downstairs. There’s a lot in the kitchen that’s gone bad but the freezer has plenty of frozen vegetables and the jars in the pantry turn out to be filled with rice and pasta and beans and, hallelujah, some dried beef.

“Gotta thank whoever lived here,” he says to Bucky as he cobbles something together.

“Breite,” Bucky says. He’s seated on the stool near the stovetop again, his elbows propped on the high stone counter and his head slung between his shoulders. He speaks to his own chest. “Doctor Marthe von der Breite. Or—I guess she wouldn’t be alive anymore, but this is where they kept her.”

“Kept her?” Steve asks as he cuts up the meat. Belatedly he realizes how many things in a kitchen can be used as a weapon and wishes he hadn’t brought Bucky in here. Of course, Bucky probably knows a dozen ways to hurt himself no matter where he is and that thought makes the world fuzzy again. Steve has to grip the counter until the moment passes.

“She wasn’t here by choice,” Bucky says, either oblivious to Steve’s fleeting panic or overlooking it. His voice is low and thick, as though it’s a struggling to get the words out. “She was the one who—did the reprogramming. They’d take me to Cottbus and every time they brought me back I’d remember less. It was her job to put something else in. The—the asset.”

Steve takes down one of the many fancy-looking frying pans that hang from an overhead rack and sets it on the stove. His own hands are shaking. He tries to ignore them and cuts a pate of butter to set in the pan. If he just keeps going maybe it will be alright.

“How’d you know she didn’t want to be here?” he asks.

“She told me. She used that, in the beginning, to—make friends, I guess. She said she always told the truth. She _promised_ that.” Bucky’s shoulders rose and fell with his breath. “I thought it was a trick at first, but I don’t think...she never did lie. I thought she was, when she said that you were dead, but then they played me the newsreel. They made me watch your funeral.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry, Bucky.”

“You should be.” There, at least, was a flash of anger. It was better than nothing, better than the blankness or the look he’d had on his face when Steve walked through the doorway to the cell downstairs. “What’d it take you, five days? I spent fifteen years of my life keeping this sickly, dumb little punk alive and the second I’m out of the picture you fly a plane into the Atlantic.”

“There were bombs,” Steve says, which is the same answer he gave to the S.H.I.E.L.D therapists who’d prodded at this.

“Yeah, and if there’d been anyone else on board with you, even _one_ , you’d have found some other way than crashing the damn plane. Look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.”

Steve meets his glare. “There wasn’t anyone else on board and it was my decision to make.”

“The hell it was!” Bucky shoves back from the counter hard enough that the legs of the stool screech on the floor. “You never fight for yourself! If somebody else’s in a jam you’re all hero, but if it’s you, you just roll over and take it.”

Steve had been drawing breath to defend himself, but Bucky’s choice of words has him rocking back on his heels. It has to be deliberate and that takes them perilously close to what happened last night. To what has been happening.

Bucky’s expression is tense, his eyes searching for Steve’s reaction. Taking a deep breath, Steve tells him, “You’re not gonna make me hate you, Bucky.”

“You should,” Bucky growls, “but you fucking won’t because you—”

“I wanted to,” Steve blurts rather than hear Bucky’s reasoning. “I wanted to do the things—last night. And before. Maybe not...that way, but I did want them.”

Bucky goes still and silent. It’s not quite exactly like Steve’s worst nightmares—those had involved a gentle, apologetic sort of pity—but it’s excruciating all the same. He wants to crawl backwards down the sink drain.

He knows he needs to keep going, to actually _say_ the words, but somehow Bucky beats him to the punch. “You said you didn’t. You said it was a trick.”

The anger’s snuffed out of him, replaced with wary confusion. The expression’s far too familiar: Steve has seen it on Bucky’s face a lot since they came back together. He hates knowing that he put it there.

“I lied. I—I don’t know why, I’m sorry. It wasn’t something that people talked about, back then.”

Bucky’s still just staring at him. “Back then?” he repeats, his voice low and soft, uncertain.

Steve swallows. He is not a coward. “Yes. Yeah.”

The urge to throw himself out of a window hasn’t gone away so Steve concentrates on mixing flour in with the melted butter. Having something to do makes the conversation slightly more bearable and he finds himself saying, “I didn’t _really_ lie, though, we never—did anything, together, but I guess I...thought about it. You. Aw, hell, Buck, I thought about you a lot. After Ma died you were the only one around who gave a damn about me and sometimes it felt like you’d always be the only one. I didn’t know to call it that but I guess I was...in love with you.”

His face must look like a fire hydrant. Steve presses his lips together and dares a quick glance at Bucky. He’s sitting at the counter watching Steve, his head tilted slightly to one side and his face blank. There’s something alive in his eyes, though, that wasn’t there before.

Steve adds chunks of beef to the sauce. “There were plenty of people like that around the neighborhood. Do you remember John Hart? The painter who lived kitty-corner to us and gave me his pastels when they wore down? He had all those young fellas hanging around his house...he got famous, in the ‘70s, for painting them. Everybody knew how he was, but nobody ever really talked about it.”

“Why didn’t you?” Bucky asks.

“I guess...I just never thought I could be that way. Whatever John Hart did was fine but I didn’t want a half-dozen boyfriends or to go out to the dive bars that folks had to go to back then. I knew that I liked women, even if none of them so much as looked my direction ‘cept to wonder how they got saddled with me for the night, and back then that was it. If you liked dames you got married and had kids.

“Plus I—it didn’t seem right. Not _morally_ , I mean. What two people do with each other is nobody’s business. But...you liked women, too, and you’d already set me up in your apartment after Ma died and you’d finished every fight I was ever in. It seemed greedy to want more of you than what I already had.”

The microwave beeps. Steve loves microwaves, even if he doesn’t entirely understand them or the safety of having them in a kitchen. Taking out the steaming dish of peas, he digs around in the cupboards for a couple of plates and divides the peas among them. The creamy chipped beef he dishes on top. “Don’t have any toast,” he announces with forced cheer as he presents the plate to Bucky. “Bon appétit.”

Bucky looks at the food then back at Steve. “Why didn’t I say anything?” he asks, and it only sounds halfway rhetorical.

“Did—you feel like that back then?”

“Yes,” Bucky answers without hesitation or uncertainty.

Steve won’t crumple to the ground. He can’t. He holds himself up and says, “I don’t know. I never even knew there was anything to say.”

Bucky frowns like he wants to argue that, but Steve doesn’t think he can bear much more of this conversation so he pushes a fork into Bucky’s hand and digs into his own plate of food. It’s been a while since he ate a proper meal and he feels shaky. He’ll be no good to Bucky if he’s too hungry to stand upright.

After a moment Bucky follows suit. They eat in silence except for the scrape of their forks and the sounds of chewing. Outside, the sun has started to come up and the birds of the forest sing to it loudly. It’d be a real pretty place, Steve thinks, if only. If only.

 

\--------

 

After they finish eating they do another, more thorough circuit of the villa. The basement they leave closed up tight, but Bucky’s vague sense-memory leads them to a hidden elevator that goes up to the attic, where they find a long room under the eaves of the roof. It’s filled with gym equipment that hasn’t been used in a long time, if the cobwebs are anything to go by: there’s a mat that might serve as a boxing or wrestling ring and the slumped, misshapen forms of old punching bags. It even has a balance beam.

Without thinking, Bucky cartwheels up onto the beam to balance on one hand, perfectly still, his legs split.

“This ring a bell?” Steve asks. His eyes dart to the place where Bucky’s shirt has fallen down to his armpits, then away. It confuses Bucky to be looked at that way, now that he understands it means that Steve actually does want him. Bucky is scarred, missing an arm, and Steve has to remind him to wash his hair or brush his teeth when it gets too bad. 

Other people flinch away, avert their eyes, but Steve _looks_ at him.

“Yes.” Bucky swings back down and dust swirls around him like water around a swimmer. “There were—exercises. Learning.” Killing. Fighting to the death. He doesn’t remember his opponents’ faces or why they were here, with him, in the ring; prisoners, maybe, the kind of disposable people that Hydra could throw at the Winter Soldier for practice.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and you don’t get to be the greatest assassin in the world without practice. Lots and lots of practice. The fighting mat is stained grey with age but it should be red, red, red and slick.

He focuses on the far wall. There’s an array of rusted weaponry lined up neatly on racks: knives of various lengths, escrima sticks, even a couple of swords. Beside him, Steve twitches. Bucky rolls his eyes. “I got three knives on me right now. If that worked I’da already done it.”

That doesn’t make Steve look any happier.

Bucky drifts over to the window. Below, the garden stretches out in zig-zags. In his mind’s eye he can see people running through the hedges, ducking, desperate, until his bullet finds them and plucks out their life.

That was one thing Hydra never had to teach him.

Behind him Steve asks, “How long were you here?”

Bucky turns and the world is doubled. He can see Steve and the dusty ruins of the gym, and he can see it filled with sunlight, shining. Feel himself split, too: one unthinking and unfeeling, the other barely improved. The two worlds overlay on top of one another. It takes several long moments before one fades into the other.

By the time he blinks and focuses again, Steve has stopped waiting for an answer and started looking scared again. He’d looked scared in the basement, too, terrified in a way he hasn’t since—since Bucky has known him, either in the weeks they’ve traveled together or the scraps of memory floating through Bucky’s head like dead rats caught in a flood.

In the basement he’d begged on his knees.

Bucky wishes to God—does he believe in God? No, yes, old and new—that there was someone else here with any sense who could take Steve Rogers by the hand and remind him what the Winter Soldier is. What he’s done. Why he isn’t the kind of person (thing) (asset) that you try to keep alive. The kind of thing he is, you put in the ground and salt the Earth.

Problem is, he’s started to remember enough to suspect that sensible person used to be _him_.

Steve, Steve was (is) expecting him to wake up to that shiny version of himself that used to exist seventy (two?) years ago. Bucky can see the place beside Rogers, in his big dumb heart, that has been saved for him. He is trained to see where his targets are weakest. He’d learned that here, in the gray(red)-stained ring.

He is Captain America’s weakness. Hydra had known that and Bucky, asset, Winter Soldier, can see it too. He’d been held back as a trump card in case Rogers became something they couldn’t control.

Because Steve would hesitate to kill him, more than they’d ever guessed: he would kneel, he would beg, he would drop every weapon or armor available to him.

The idea makes Bucky wish he’d been faster, that he’d pulled the trigger before Steve had found him. He’d tried before, he thinks. Not a gun, but some kind of improvised shiv he’d made from a sliver of metal taken from the bars in his cell. It’d started out as a weapon but then Breite had done something and—he couldn’t attack them anymore. He wasn’t afraid, by then he’d burned through to the other side of fear, he just _couldn’t_.

So he’d cut his own throat and bled out, naked and alone, on the dirty floor of his cell...only to wake up with several doctors examining him curiously.

When they’d brought him to Breite again she’d been sitting in her chair as placidly as ever. _The asset’s death, like its life, belongs to Hydra. Accept that._

Take away hope, take away fear and despair, take away even the ability to give up, and what else was left? By the time they’d given him a gun he hadn’t even thought to turn it on either them or himself.

_Be nothing. Don’t think._

“Steve,” he says. “Steve, you shoulda let me do it.”

“No,” Steve replies instantly.

Bucky leans against the window and wonders if he’d survive the fall. Steve twitches again like he’s wondering the same thing. “It’s not worth it,” Bucky tells him wearily. He’s so fucking tired. “I’ve got a grave ready for me and everything. I can go back to being some hero who died way back when.”

“Bucky,” Steve says sternly. He squares up and Bucky’s heart sinks. “None of this was your fault. Howard, me, none of it. They made you do these things and you shouldn’t have to pay for their sins.”

Bucky can’t help it: he laughs. It’s ugly, strained. “You think I...I don’t feel _guilty_ , Steve.”

Steve blinks, clearly thrown. “You don’t?”

“Not for the things you think I should.” Steve starts to speak and Bucky talks over. “I don’t feel guilty for killing anyone. Like you said, I didn’t have any choice. They made me do it.”

“Then _why_?”

Taking a deep breath, Bucky tastes dust and rot and the trace memory of blood, hovering over this whole building like a pall. “I broke. They spent a couple years working on it and they won. I broke all the damn way, right down the middle to nothing. There’s not a person in here anymore—maybe if there was, I’d feel guilty like you think I should. But the only thing I feel is tired. You should—you should let me rest.”

Steve’s got his shoulders hiked up around his ears, the world’s most awkward fighting stance. If he’d been here back then, when the Winter Soldier was being born in the ring, Bucky would have gone low and come up for his heart. The fact that Bucky can still think that is all the justification he needs for a bullet; whatever they felt—feel—for each other, there’s nothing good left in Bucky. It was smashed out of him years ago.

Wetting his lips, Steve mumbles, “Let’s go back downstairs, huh?”

Bucky sighs and follows him to the elevator. Why the hell not? He’s been doing things he hasn’t wanted for as long as he can remember.

 

\--------

 

Around midmorning biology reasserts itself. Steve ignores it for as long as he can, until Bucky comments, “You’re squeezing your knees like a kid, Steve. It’s making _my_ bladder hurt.”

“You might wanna get that looked at,” Steve parries, tossing aside yet another file full of expense reports. “You know what they say about old men.”

Bucky snorts and turns a page in his file. They’re in the study, going over the handful of files that had been left behind. It doesn’t look like anything important: memos and requisitions, mostly. It’s both amusing and horrible to realize that Hydra is every bit as bureaucratic as S.H.I.E.L.D, the US Army, or any other organization.

Steve knows they’re not going to find anything useful but he needs to keep Bucky busy somehow. After he’d first been captured by Zola that hadn’t been a problem but now...they’ve spent so long trying to find out what Hydra did to Bucky that it’s hard to switch horses. _Speak or don’t speak?_

Bucky doesn’t look up from the paper in his hands. He says in a monotone, “I promise not to off myself while you piss.”

Steve grits his teeth again and goes. At first he looks for a bathroom on the first floor so that he doesn’t have to go upstairs, then he stiffens his back and heads for the master bathroom like a man with something to prove.

Bucky’s clothes are still strewn across the floor of the shower. Steve should pick them up and hang them somewhere to dry but he isn’t ready to—

He concentrates on urinating into a toilet that probably cost more than Steve’s life is worth. The opulence bothers him, like a steel wool pad just lightly scraping the skin. Maybe what Bucky says is true and whoever lived here weren’t willing occupants, but even then they were living in luxury while Bucky and whoever else might have been here with him were down below, locked away in the dark like animals.

Of course that was probably their intention, he muses as he washes his hands. The contrast only serving to heighten the message that Breite was busy drilling into Bucky’s fractured mind: that he was something sub-human, wrong and twisted. A lot of Bucky’s behavior—his preoccupation with the procedures Hydra performed on him, his reaction when they’d taken off the arm—suddenly makes a lot more sense. 

Steve’s hands are shaking.

He makes the mistake of looking up at himself in the mirror. The pallor in his face and the visible sweat on his upper lip make him cringe and he tears his gaze away. He should check the second satellite phone. He thinks it’s out in the bedroom—he’d left it sitting on top of his pants while he took his shower last night but then Bucky—and this morning—

Stop. Don’t think about that. Don’t think about Bucky over him, tears lost to shower-water. Don’t think about Bucky in the cell downstairs, barrel of the revolver shoved in his mouth.

His knees buckle and he slides down to the floor, gripping the edge of the sink to at least make it a controlled fall. His face tingles. In his chest his heartbeat feels fluttery and weak, the way it did when he was young and had to listen all the time for that murmur.

 _Stop stop stop_ , he begs his uncooperative body. He needs to get up and help Bucky, who’s been through something so much worse than him. He can’t do this right now. It’s selfish. Bucky’s downstairs and anything could be happening to him right now, he could be doing anything to himself while Steve sits here like a damned fool. He presses his forehead against the edge of the sink, grinds his skull against it.

The vibration of quick footsteps on the floor makes him straighten up. Bucky comes through the doorway of the bathroom and Steve cringes, shutting his mouth tight. His breath whistles through his nose, too much in too small a space.

“Steve,” Bucky says.

He has to stop. Bucky needs his help, needs to know that he can count on Steve. He has to. He can’t.

“Steve,” Bucky repeats. He doesn’t touch Steve but he’s close, crouched right at his side. “C’mon,” he says. “You gotta breathe. One-two-three...one-two-three.”

The words float through Steve’s mind, briefly swirling around the miasma of dread before they connect to memory of when they were both smaller—in Steve’s case, _much_ smaller. This has happened before, not exactly the same but close enough that he knows how to respond. How to follow Bucky’s voice out of the swimming panic and tight pain in his chest.

“One-two-three...one-two-three. C’mon, Stevie, breathe with me.”

Bit by bit, Steve’s fingers unclench from the sink. His shoulders rise and fall in time with Bucky’s count, and on each exhale they drop a little further until he is sagging. Rocking back on his heels, he lands on his ass and lets his back hit the far wall.

Bucky pivots, dropping out of his crouch and watching Steve’s face. Steve avoids his eyes and focuses on relaxing each individual part of his body, neck, shoulders, arms, stomach, legs, chasing the panic out.

It takes a while. The whole time Bucky sits next to him, his knee pressed into Steve’s hip. Eventually, once Steve’s breath has settled into its usual rhythm, Bucky asks, “Why am I counting?”

Steve coughs a laugh and has to take a few moments to regain his breath before he can answer. “A-asthma. I used to get attacks...when I was a kid. You’d count to get me to breathe again.”

Bucky’s expression goes distant and blank. “I don’t remember that.”

Steve lets his head rest against the wall behind him, closing his eyes against the way the world spins as he does so. “You knew to count.”

“But you don’t get asthma anymore.”

“Not since the serum.”

“Then why are you on the floor?”

A lot of things want to pop out of Steve’s mouth but none of them are helpful. So he swallows them all down and shakes his head. He has that floaty feeling again. It’s possible that he’s had it all day.

When he opens his eyes again Bucky is pulling his hands away with a grimace.

“You can,” Steve tells him. He has to stop, clear his throat to keep his voice from breaking. “You can touch me if you want.”

“No.” Bucky presses his hands up against his own chest, then lowers them to his sides, then actually tucks his palms beneath his hips, sitting on them like a guilty child. “I’m not gonna hurt you again.”

Steve’s heart breaks, grief and disappointment and uncertainty crowding for too little space. “You won’t, I trust you.”

Bucky gives an ugly, strangled laugh. “I already did,” he says, jerking his chin at the shower. “There’s nothin’ else in me anymore. I told you, they took me out and put in...knives, and arteries and—”

“That’s not true. Bucky, c’mon, look at me.”

Bucky has fixed his gaze on the wall next to Steve’s head. He doesn’t move it but Steve can see the way something behind his eyes crumples. “I can’t,” he whispers, and his mouth wobbles horribly. “I can’t. The asset does not make eye contact.”

That—God Almighty, Steve can only guess at the origin of that. He doesn’t want to. Whatever it is, it’s got Bucky locked up tight, and so far Steve’s only found one way of reaching him.

It’s still not right, Bucky’s still lost and confused—but Steve keeping his distance hasn’t helped either of them. It hasn’t been _honest_ , and Steve is suddenly very tired of lying.

Reaching out, he tentatively curls his hand around Bucky’s knee. Bucky’s eyes snap up, fixing on that point. His whole body tenses, but he doesn’t move away. Steve’s imagined this plenty of times, with Bucky and Peggy and even Natasha, but the translation to reality is nerve-wracking. Before now his only experience was with the chorus girls, who wore makeup to bed and had been all too happy to make the moves on _him_.

This is different. This is him leaning forward slow enough that Bucky can pull away if he wants. He doesn’t; he stays still as a spooked deer and watches Steve come towards him. It’s not the first time that they’ve kissed but it’s the first without ulterior motive—without Steve trying to make it into a distraction or a weapon.

If he thinks about it that way Steve feels ashamed of himself. So he doesn’t.

He presses his lips to Bucky’s and lets himself think about only that. There are so many little things he’d missed before: the scratch of stubble, the hitch in their breathing that has nothing to do with panic, the way Bucky’s hair falls around both their faces like a curtain.

The tension doesn’t go out of Bucky and he keeps his hands away; but he kisses back. When Steve lifts a hand to the side of Bucky’s neck Bucky twitches all over, so Steve drops it to his shoulder instead. It’s the metal one. Steve strokes at it unconsciously, running his hand down over the strange metal. He’d felt it before, even took it apart, but not like this—attached to Bucky, full of his small movements and reactions.

Steve moves his other hand to the outside of Bucky’s hip and scoots closer. Bucky’s had more obvious practice at this: whatever his mind has forgotten his body clearly remembers, because he kisses open-mouthed and easily, turning his head this way and that. He doesn’t push his tongue into Steve’s mouth—for which Steve is grateful, that makes him feel awkward and uncertain how to respond—but every time they shift apart he gives Steve’s lips a little kitten lick.

“You shouldn’t,” Bucky mumbles against his lips, “I’m not.”

“You are,” Steve promises, pressing another kiss to the corner of Bucky’s mouth, the place where his smiles used to grow. “You pulled me out of the river. You saved my life, Bucky. You are.”

-o-

At some indeterminate hour of night, Steve wakes to the sound of Bucky’s voice speaking quietly but quickly. “—kill you if you touch him. Don’t come any closer.”

“I’m not planning to, Sergeant Barnes,” replies a male voice from, Jesus, right in the room with them.

Steve jerks all the way awake. They’d gone to sleep together in the master bedroom, curled on the floor in a nest of every pillow and comforter that Steve could find from the house, but now Bucky crouches over Steve, a vibrating presence in the dark. His gaze is fixed on the man standing in the doorway lit in the glow of his own flashlight.

Steve gapes at the man. “Coulson?”

“Good evening, Captain,” Agent Phil Coulson greets before he turns back to Bucky. “I’ve worked with Captain Rogers in the past. I realize that, given recent events, it’s not much reassurance to identify myself and my team as former agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, so I’ll simply state our intentions: we are here to help.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky holds a gun to his own head and Steve has to talk him out of killing himself. Steve later has a panic attack.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky crouches in the rafters of the villa’s grand entrance and tries not to panic.
> 
>  
> 
> Warnings for psychological torture, brainwashing, and mental reprogramming. See end notes for exact details. Also, this fic is running slightly longer than I had intended, to the shock of absolutely no-one. It should be 11 chapters total.

Bucky crouches in the rafters of the villa’s grand entrance and tries not to panic.

Really, the only thing stopping him is that Steve has carefully stayed within eyesight. Currently he’s on the ground floor, about fifty feet below Bucky’s perch, talking to Agent Phillip Coulson. They’d judged the main entrance to have little significant intelligence value; the rest of Agent Coulson’s team—three techs with minimal combat training, an impassive woman who evaluates Bucky from a distance in a way that implies getting any closer would end poorly for one or both of them, and a man whose face is somehow familiar to Bucky—crawl all over the rest of the house, taking pictures and extracting intel like small, swift termites.

Occasionally one of them will approach Agent Coulson with an update—with a swift, nervous glance upwards—but other than that they stay clear.

Once he’d been assured that Coulson is no threat to Steve, Bucky had gone straight out an upstairs window onto the roof. From there he’d watched the technicians arrive in a van that bears the S.H.I.E.L.D logo on its side, before using his left arm to smash a hole into the roof, clambering down to his current vantage point.

Now he sits with the hunting rifle balanced across his knees, watching as Steve and Agent Coulson speak. They’re too far away to hear, but apparently Bucky can lip-read. (He doesn’t remember learning that skill, it simply exists inside of him, whole and inexplicable and unnoticed until this moment.) 

Everything they’re saying is stuff he either already knows (Steve) or beyond his understanding (Agent Coulson, who apparently came here at the behest of the red-haired Russian but is also full of news about some place called _Asgard_ ).

Agent Coulson himself is more difficult to read. He’s middle-aged, with a bland smile and a blander suit, but he’d also made it all the way to the hallway outside the master bedroom without waking Bucky. He speaks to Steve with calm efficiency and to his team with authority, but there’s something awed and awkward beneath the surface. Despite his obviously senior rank he’s ever so slightly deferential to Steve, and that’s really the only thing that stops Bucky from putting a bullet through his head.

That, and the fact that he’d called Bucky ‘Sergeant Barnes.’

It isn’t as though Bucky had doubted Steve. Even if he had, there was the Smithsonian exhibit. But Coulson is a real human being who has looked at Bucky like he is, too, and called him that name.

In absence of bullets, he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do. Yesterday he’d put a gun in his mouth and begged Steve to let him die; yet now he can’t help the animal instinct to run, escape, try to keep himself alive.

It took a long time for Hydra to break him. Apparently, Bucky Barnes is nothing if not stubborn.

He falls back on logistics, the cold strategy of the Winter Soldier. He and Steve need protection. Interpol is looking for them; likely so are multiple international intelligence organizations. In the chaos surrounding Hydra’s reveal, they’ve managed to slip through the cracks, but it’s only a matter of time before someone begins to pursue them in earnest. It may be a little longer before Hydra joins the pursuit, but they will come. They might already be on the move.

Alone, Bucky could evade them. Steve, though, is recognizable, and he was not made for stealth. Steve will not want to split up and Bucky—Bucky—would...

It doesn’t matter, though, because Steve won’t let him go willingly. Which means they need allies. Which means that Bucky needs to get along with those allies well enough that they don’t lock him in a cell of their own. So he sits in the rafters watching Steve’s muscles move under his shirt and the whorls of his ears and the way he keeps touching his week-old growth of beard self-consciously, and Bucky doesn’t even think about shooting anyone.

That is, until the sniper walks in the room.

Bucky makes him as such immediately, not only because of the enhanced recurve bow strapped to his back. The way his eyes sweep the room, the way he moves—all of it is intimately familiar to Bucky. He tenses; the impassive woman is more of a close-range fighter, but a sniper could require a quick change in position if he—

“Barton!” Steve exclaims loud enough for Bucky to hear him, breaking off from his conversation with Coulson. They exchange a handshake that Barton allows Steve to turn into a one-armed hug. Bucky tightens his grip on the rifle. _How are you?_

 _Better than you, considering the last I heard you were at the bottom of the Potomac._ Steve makes a face and starts to say something—Bucky would bet it isn’t ‘I got kidnapped and held hostage by a deadly assassin who threatened to kill someone I love if I ran’—but Barton waves it away. _Naw, don’t worry ‘bout it. Everybody’s fake-dying these days, it’s the new thing._

Steve has his head turned towards Barton and misses Coulson’s eye-rolling reaction. From above, Bucky doesn’t. Nor does he miss the odd body language between Clint and Coulson, a muddle of parent-child, fellow soldiers, and friends. They are equals but they are not: Barton is deferential to Coulson in the same way that Coulson is to Steve, not because of a rank but out of respect. 

Bucky wonders why he can tell all that from his perch in the rafters, but has yet to have a conversation with another human being who isn’t Steve.

Barton thumps Steve in the chest with the back of his hand. _Hey, you mind doing me a favor? Can you tell your buddy in the rafters not to shoot me?_

Bucky moves the butt of the rifle into his shoulder even as Steve turns and squints up at him. “Bucky,” Steve calls. “Clint’s a friend of mine, please don’t hurt him. Unless he hurts you first,” he adds with a sideways glance at Barton, who says, _Thanks_.

Bucky chews the inside of his cheek. Below, Clint Barton carefully takes the bow from his back and draws an arrow from his quiver. The sight of it triggers something in Bucky’s mind, the memory of a necklace flashing in the sun; but he can’t place it and doesn’t see its relevance so he pushes the memory aside. 

Barton moves slow and smooth, telegraphing every movement as he draws the flight back, aims at the roof several feet from Bucky’s vantage point, and fires. The arrow hits the roof with a _shunk_. It’s a grappling line, with multiple prongs that imbed in the ceiling. Barton gives the other end a couple of tugs then does something to the bow that attaches it to the floor. Bucky watches Clint zipline his way up and does his best not to duck away into the rafters.

Once he's on eye-level with Bucky, Barton steadies himself with a leg looped over the line and peers around. “Nice spot. How’d you get up here, though?”

Bucky stays silent and after a moment Barton turns away, unzipping a large pouch on his thigh and drawing out a tablet. After tapping it a couple of times, he spins the whole thing around so that Bucky can see the screen.

On the tablet, a video is playing. It’s a stationary shot, likely from a surveillance camera, of a large, sunlit room full of glass partitions. The gray walls and blank spaces would be sterile if it weren’t for all the bodies littering the floor. Bucky counts seven, probably more out of frame. The red-haired Russian woman is there, as is a tall black man whose face _is_ familiar to Bucky in a way that means he’s forgotten it, and—and—

The world tilts sideways and Bucky grips the rifle, trying to hold on. The short, blond man in the center of the room speaks with silent authority, calm amidst the destruction. He is at gunpoint but he is not afraid. The other two lower their weapons. Alexander Pierce is nothing but pixels, yet Bucky is breaking into a sweat, filled with clawing terror. _Mission report. Mission report._

Something happens and the Russian woman falls. The black man drops, too, but he comes back up fast and he—

The world snaps back into focus and Bucky blinks as the collection of pixels crashes through a glass door, hitting the ground with finality. The other two get up, move around checking pulses, and eventually hurry out, but Pierce stays down and stays down and stays down. Something dark begins to pool under his still form.

The video ends. There is a ‘replay’ button, though, and Bucky almost falls from his perch trying to reach for it.

“Whoa, whoa, dude.” Barton turns the tablet around and presses it for him.

They repeat this process three times over. Bucky examines the shadows and reflections on glass for any sign that the footage has been tampered with. If it has there’s no obvious sign. That leaves the possibility of a body double. He studies Pierce’s movements. They are calm and deliberate, exactly like Bucky remembers.

After the fourth time he concludes there’s nothing more that he can learn from the video. When he peels his eyes away and looks at Barton, the man is watching him with patient stillness that is, too, very familiar to Bucky. If he’s tired from holding the tablet out at arm’s length so that Bucky can see the screen, he doesn’t show it. 

Barton turns the tablet around, taps a few buttons, and puts it away. Bucky presses back into his perch. Steve and Agent Coulson have resumed their hushed debrief, but Steve’s eyes occasionally rise to him. Bucky isn’t sure if he should smile or nod or thank Barton. He settles for staring back at Steve.

Barton draws his attention again by digging out an apple and beginning to polish it on his uniform.

“Once upon a time,” he says, “there was a dashing and strikingly handsome young hero who’d read too many books about Robin Hood as a kid.”

He pauses. Bucky watches Barton watch him and tries to understand what he’s being told and why. “That was...is that supposed to be you?”

“No,” Barton tells him flatly. “That would be ridiculous. Why would I tell a fairytale about myself? Also, if this story were about me it’d be breaking several levels of classification for me to tell you about it. Now, while the young hero was brave and clever and really ridiculously good-looking, he did have one fatal flaw: he was gullible. That made him an easy target for all sorts of bad people, some of whom were even related to him, and pretty soon, instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor he found himself killing the rich for other rich people.

“The hero’s amazing skills got noticed. One day, in the middle of a particularly daring adventure, he was captured and taken to a—castle. He expected the usual treatment, you know, torture, execution, but instead a...an advisor came to see him and offered him a safe place to hang and free food so long as he went to work for the castle. All-in-all, a pretty sweet deal and a lot better than torture and execution, so the hero took it. Soon he was running around having all sorts of wild and crazy adventures on the castle’s orders, and it wasn’t too bad. 

“Then came the day that they sent the hero out on the most dangerous adventure yet: to do battle with a deadly assassin.” Taking a bite of his apple, Barton speaks around one bulging cheek. “This assassin, as I mentioned, was deadly. Kill list a mile long, all sorts of villainy. The hero girded his fucking loins and rode out to do battle—except when he got there.”

He swallows. “When he got there, he discovered that the assassin was a beautiful young princess with flame-red hair.”

Bucky frowns. He doesn’t think he likes fairytales. The real world is confusing enough. “The Russian woman?” he asks.

Then he flinches hard as the apple beans him right in the forehead before plummeting downward. He has the rifle against his shoulder and aimed at Barton’s head instantly. Below them, Steve shouts in alarm, calling his name.

Barton completely ignores the rifle and points one leather-clad finger at Bucky’s head, scowling. “That was for shooting her. That’s your freebie. We all get one. Hell, last year I got skullfucked by a Norse god and tried to cut her throat. So you get one freebie for reasons of skullfucking. If you shoot her again I’ll shove a shock arrow straight up your ass and _yeah_ , I realize you’ll be killing me as I do it but we’ve all got that one person that we’d die for, _don’t we_.”

There follows a long, tense pause before Bucky slowly lowers the rifle. These are Steve’s friends. Steve will not like it if Bucky shoots his friends. Besides, despite the unexpected projectiles he thinks that he...recognizes the patterns of Barton’s behavior. They are...familiar, not in the way that means he’s forgotten something but more like he innately understands them, same as he understands the way Barton moves and treats his weapons, and the way Barton knew that he would want to watch Pierce die more than once.

It is...comforting. He understands the way another human being works, and that is a comfort.

He doesn’t take his finger off the trigger, though. He asks, “What about the princess?”

“She was beautiful, but the hero was not deceived. It wasn’t about that. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The hero did think it was kind of shitty to find out that this deadly assassin was actually a seventeen-year-old girl, but he was still totally willing to throw down until he looked at the princess and realized that she wouldn’t make eye contact.”

Barton tips his head to one side, his eyes on Bucky’s face. On his eyes. At first Bucky forces himself to meet Barton’s gaze but it becomes enough of a struggle that Barton would be able to tell anyways. He lets his eyes slide ever so slightly to the left. Breite had had a small mole to the left of her eye and he’d gotten in the habit of keeping his gaze fixed there.

It’s a small defeat, but Hydra had won so many. Like chips off a block, they’d whittled him into something new.

Barton goes on. “The hero realized the princess was under a spell. It was a really old spell—seventy years old, as a matter a’ fact—invented by some really bad people then sold to some other really bad people who’d used it on the princess. Luckily the hero had heard of it in his travels, so when the advisor came on the comm and told the hero to take the shot, he didn’t do it. Which, lemme tell ya, made the advisor really hard to be around for, like, two months.”

He directs a glare down at Coulson. Bucky asks, “What happened to the princess?”

“The hero took her back to the castle. In retrospect, not the best idea, but given what the hero and everyone else believed at the time, I think we can all agree that his mistake was completely understandable.”

Bucky thinks he knows how Barton works— _You’re a real asshole, you know that, Barnes?_ —so he takes a chance and says, “Gullible.”

Barton narrows his eyes. “Fuck you. Point being—when they got to the castle, the princess was sent to the healers. They couldn’t undo the spell all the way, they couldn’t return her to whatever she was before, but they made it so that she could live.”

Swallowing, Bucky rubs a thumb over the stock of the rifle. He thinks back to the Russian woman, how logical she’d always seemed to him. Or to the Winter Soldier, anyway. He should have realized before that there was a reason—but somehow, even with the signs that the cells below had seen recent use, he’d thought he must be the only one. 

For someone prone to yelling and throwing apples at people’s heads, Barton can revert to stillness very quickly. He waits while Bucky turns over the thoughts in his head.

Finally Bucky asks, “Are those healers still around?”

“Some of them. The advisor knows where they are now.” Unlooping his leg, Barton prepares to descend on his line but lingers. “So, I don’t really know if I’ll have another chance to say this,” he says, his eyes fixed on Coulson and Steve below, “but you were kinda my hero growing up. I might even have had a secondhand Bucky Bear as a kid.”

Bucky stares. "What the hell is a Bucky Bear?"

Barton tosses him a sardonic smirk, says, "You'll find out," and zips away.

Bucky takes it back, he’s not sure he understands Barton at all.

 

\--------

 

Besides Clint Barton, Steve doesn’t know any of the other members of Coulson’s team. He’s seen Agent May around the Triskelion and knows that she used to report directly to Fury, but they’ve never spoken. They barely do now: May seems preoccupied with keeping her teammates out of direct eyeline with wherever Bucky and Bucky’s rifle happen to be at the moment.

Steve can’t fault her reasoning.

After yesterday, it scares him to think about Bucky out there with a gun, though for different reasons than Agent May. He doesn’t think that Bucky will—do anything to himself. Not when he believes he has to cover Steve’s six. Steve has felt that prickle along his spine often enough to know that Bucky is sighting on him. Considering recent events that probably shouldn’t be as big a comfort as it is.

He and Coulson move into the study on Clint’s advice—“Big window, good sightlines from the garden”—and clear a spot on the large desk for Coulson’s computer, a large flat tablet that he lays down between them.

“Cottbus was a goldmine of information,” Coulson relates as he slides files around the screen faster than Steve can keep track. “Officially my team was not part of the joint task force, but Agent Romanoff managed to make a copy of the data as it was downloaded from Hydra’s servers. Your friend with the wings delivered it to us personally.”

“Sam repaired his wings?”

“Apparently Mr. Stark got his hands on them after DC. I’ll let you imagine how well that went.”

“How’s Stark?”

“He’s been informed that you’re alive. I’ll let you imagine how well that went, too.”

Steve winces and sighs. It’s been in the back of his mind all along but now he truly contemplates what an personnel disaster is waiting for him when he returns to his life. He’s never been close with the other Avengers—after New York they’d carefully gone their separate ways, not wanting to attract too much attention by remaining all together in one place—but they’d fought together. Steve knows a thing or two about combat bonds and he owes an apology several times over, to them and to Hill. They’d trusted him and he let them down.

Pushing that aside, he refocuses on the images that Coulson is bringing up. “What am I looking at?”

“We’re still sorting the data, but one of my technicians wrote a program to sort out and decrypt any references to Sergeant Barnes or the Winter Soldier. Most of it is things we already knew, some we didn’t, and...this.”

He brings up a strange image that looks like the X-ray of a bright green cauliflower. When Steve looks to Coulson, he explains, “It’s a series of brain scans performed on Sergeant Barnes in 1957. We believe that’s when he changed hands from the KGB to the Russian branch of Hydra. Apparently they wanted to know exactly what they had.”

There are more of the scans, lots more. They all look different, but they’re dated the same day. “Are they—supposed to look like that?”

“No. Using that date as a cross-reference, Fitz was able to find an audio recording.” Coulson brings up the file and pauses, his finger hovering over the _play_ symbol. “It’s not pleasant, Captain,” he warns quietly.

Straightening up from the desk, Steve folds his arms and nods. Coulson taps the screen and the hiss of an old recording emits from the laptop’s built-in speakers. There’s a voice speaking in Russian, which Coulson translates for Steve. “Winter Soldier subject, day three after reanimation. Regeneration of neural tissue extensive, subject erratic. Protocol for neural redirectioning approved by project managers...they list all of the doctors on the project here,” Coulson says as the voice rattles off several names.

“Electrically-induced neural redirectioning,” Steve interjects. “We, I saw that mentioned in the files we took from the base in Slovenia.”

“That was you?” Off of Steve’s nod, Coulson lifts his eyebrows briefly. “Impressive work.”

The recording continues. Several voices speak to one another in Russian—Coulson translates the important bits to Steve, but it’s mostly jargon about machinery that’s above his head anyway—and Steve finds himself straining to hear Bucky’s voice, even a murmured syllable.

There isn’t one, even after the other voices fall silent. A new sound starts up. Electricity.

And there, at last, is a faint sound: a muffled whimper that makes all the hair on Steve’s neck stand up.

A different voice, female, speaks. “What is your name?” Coulson translates.

Steve waits, sick, for Bucky’s reply—but there is none. Another, male voice speaks. “Synapse located.”

The recording crackles with a burst of sound. Bucky makes a horrible noise, still muffled as though by a gag. Steve’s stomach twists and he sucks in a breath.

Coulson’s mouth is a thin line as he translates the series of questions. “Where were you born? What was your mother’s name? What was your father’s name?” On and on, punctuated by bursts of electricity and the sound of Bucky’s agony.

There’s still plenty of file left when Coulson hits the stop button. Steve realizes he’s stopped breathing and lets his air out slowly. “They were burning the memories out of him?”

“Somewhat,” Coulson says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Our brains normally perform what’s called synaptic pruning—unused pathways to stored information eventually fade away. What they did accelerated the process. From what we can gather, they mapped the way his brain responded to a list of questions then cauterized the pathways to that information. The problem is that he has a version of the super-soldier serum and his neural tissue can repair itself, albeit slowly.”

“So they did that to him every time they took him out of cryostasis.”

“We believe so, yes. Though it’s unlikely that, following this instance, they had to bother with the prolonged question and answer session. Once they’d mapped the brain activity that they found...undesirable, they could wipe it all by pressing one button. In a matter of minutes they’d have a highly skilled operative who didn’t remember anything but what they wanted him to remember. Of course the first time they did it, MRI technology didn’t exist so their methods and their results both would have been far more...haphazard. Would you like to sit down, Captain?”

“Yes,” Steve says heavily, and sits in the ancient leather chair behind the desk. Then he stands back up and shifts it so that he faces the window before resettling, his hands in his hair. “How does...how do people _do_ that?”

Coulson leans against the desk—carefully angled towards the window as well—with his arms folded and shrugs wearily. “How do people operate concentration camps? How does anyone walk past a homeless child on the street and not stop to help? Once a belief system says that a person or a group of people are somehow sub-human, it becomes much easier to justify treating them as such. In that respect, Sergeant Barnes’ training here was as much for his handlers’ benefit...if they didn’t think of him as a human being they could do whatever they wanted to him with impunity.”

Steve sighs and drops his hands, lets them dangle between his knees. “They said...his neural tissue repairs itself. Does that mean that...his memories will come back?”

“Possibly,” Coulson answers slowly. “I don’t want to give you false hope, Captain. There’s no precedent for this, everything is theoretical. Even if his memories do begin to return, they’ll be fragmented and disorganized.”

Steve chuffs a bitter laugh. “They have been.” Another, more terrible thought occurs to him and he swallows hard before asking, “Did they...would a side effect of what they did, or maybe it was deliberate, could they have made him—”

He breaks off, grits his teeth. Coulson waits in silence until Steve tries to come at it from a different angle. “Natasha owes you twenty bucks.” Coulson tilts his head, frowning. “For the bet you two made about me. You said you thought I was _one way_ and she said I was _another_ and she bet you twenty? She mentioned it the last time I saw her…”

“Oh,” Coulson says, realization dawning. “ _Oh._ And she would owe—”

“Yes,” Steve says desperately. “Because you were right.”

“I...see. And you’re—um, pardon me a moment, Captain.”

Getting up, he crosses to the door and pushes it almost all the way closed. Steve glances out the window. He can’t see Bucky. He doesn’t know whether to be grateful for that. Part of him wants to turn away or pull down the curtains but he can guess how Bucky would take that. A bigger part of him doesn’t want to even ask this question...but he needs to know.

Coulson rejoins him at the desk, taking a seat in one of the smaller chairs on the far side. He knits his fingers together and sets them in his lap. “I would guess that this has some bearing on Sergeant Barnes’ condition.”

“Yes.”

“And is this...a new development in your relationship?”

“Yes...and no. We.” Steve makes himself take a deep breath. That instinctive fear rises up in him again, wanting to bury his words deep down where no one will ever see. He digs them out. “He’s remembered enough that we were able to talk about the past a little. I knew...that I was in love with him, back then, and he says that he was in love with me. But neither of us said anything.”

“And now?”

“Now—he’s kind of. Fixated on it.” This isn’t quite as terrible as telling Natasha, or even Bucky. Maybe it’s something you get used to the more times you do it...or maybe it’s easier because this feels more like a mission debrief. “We’ve had a couple of encounters, but he’s tried to start something more times than that. Usually when he’s upset or remembered something that made him upset. It does...calm him down, but I’m afraid that’s part of his programming.”

Coulson is silent, staring at the far side of the room. Steve twists his hands together. He glances at the window again but sees only green hedges, their vines waving in a gentle breeze.

“There are operatives trained to use sex as part of their persona,” Coulson says eventually, and Steve gets the impression that he’s choosing each word with care. “Everything that we know about the Winter Soldier, however, points against that. It’s possible that rape was used during the brainwashing process as a psychological weapon—but if, as you said, he only just remembered the time he spent here, then it’s unlikely that he would have imprinted on that behavior unless they wanted him to, and I...can’t think of how that would be strategically valuable, given the type of missions he went on.”

“What about the neural redirectioning? Could that have done something to him?”

“Possibly. There’s very little way to be sure.” Catching Steve’s frustration, Coulson sighs and sits forward, steepling his fingers. “They tried to turn Sergeant Barnes into something less than an animal. No memory, no fear, no empathy, and for seventy years they succeeded. In that entire period of time, the Winter Soldier did not fail a single mission that we know of. He also didn’t run around getting,” he waves a hand, “fixated on anyone else. And then he met you and went straight off the reservation. He disobeyed a direct order to kill you and instead began targeting the very people who’d been giving him shelter and food and the only sense of self, however deceitful and damaging, that he’d had in seventy years.

“That is not insignificant. That is the furthest thing from insignificant that I can think of. He killed Howard Stark and Sergeant Dugan, he killed dozens of strangers without hesitation, but he wouldn’t kill you.”

The weight of that sinks in. It’s familiar but it’s heavy all the same. “What the hell do I do?” he asks, half of himself.

“I’m not sure there’s an answer I can give you,” Coulson answers, quiet. “For whatever it’s worth, Captain, he’s alive. You’re alive. I fully understand your concerns, but that, too, is not insignificant.”

A tap at the door makes Steve flinch and Coulson rise from his chair. A young female agent pokes her head in and stares at Steve for an uncomfortable beat. “Yes, Skye?” Coulson prompts with a touch of exasperation.

“Hey, uh. We’ve got the, uh, charges set. Ready to go whenever you are, boss.”

“Thank you.” Agent Skye backs out, still peering at Steve until the crack in the door disappears. “Do you know where you’re headed next?” When Steve shakes his head, Coulson takes a notepad from the desk and writes down an address. “This is an apartment in Paris, not on S.H.I.E.L.D’s radar. It’s secure. Or as secure as anything can be right now. We’re still pulling out the weeds.”

“Thank you,” Steve says, rising to take the slip. “There’s, can you let me know if you find anything else from the intel?”

Coulson nods. “Of course. Once Fitz’s program finishes running I’ll compile a drive and contact you.” 

Steve licks his lips and digs into his pocket. The photograph of Bucky and Breite in the garden has gotten worn around the edges. He hands it over facedown so that Coulson can read the back first. “Revenant. Project Revenant. That might be another thing that you search for.”

He winces but doesn’t intercede when Coulson turns the photograph over. Coulson betrays no reaction. He says, “I’ll make sure he adds that to the search parameters,” as he hands the photo back.

“Thank you. And, I hate to ask for anything else, but we could use some supplies. We’ve been stealing a lot more than I care to admit.”

“Agent Triplett’s already putting together a couple of kits for you.” Pausing, Coulson shifts his weight before saying, “Natasha would owe me twenty bucks, too. For—me. Because of me, I mean—”

Cutting off, he bows his head and presses his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose for a long moment before lifting his head and continuing with an air of grim determination. “I’ve dated both men and women in the past. If you have questions or simply need someone to talk to—I would be more than happy to help you find someone qualified to speak to you on the subject.”

He smiles like a wince. Steve finds himself struggling not to smile as well. He wants to thank Coulson for that alone. “Thank you, Agent.”

Regrouping, Coulson looks him dead in the eye. “Don’t let them get him again, Captain. That’ll end bad for all of us.”

“I’m not going to,” Steve tells him, and hopes that Bucky is watching.

-o-

By the time Coulson’s team has picked the villa clean of intel, it’s mid-afternoon. The sun warms the back of Steve’s neck as he heads for the treeline, pausing to turn and wave over his shoulder as the van pulls out of the villa’s gravel entrance. He carries with him two full travel packs and, inexplicably, a bottle of Scotch.

He isn’t sure where to go, exactly, but he figures that doesn’t matter too much. When he reaches the treeline he stops there to wait.

About three minutes go by before Bucky steps silently from around a tree. Or—not Bucky. The Winter Soldier.

Steve very, very carefully doesn’t tense up. He keeps his hands at his sides and says, “Heya, pal.”

The hard jaw and square posture stay in place—and then Bucky’s face twists sharply. He drops the rifle to the ground and practically barrels into Steve, flinging his arms around his neck.

Surprised, Steve lets his arms curl over Bucky’s back, holding him close. “Hey. Bucky? Are you alright?”

What he gets in response isn’t words in any language, just a tangled mess of syllables. Bucky’s arms tighten and Steve instinctively strokes his back through the thin T-shirt. “Okay, okay. Shh, settle down. I just gotta, lemme—”

He doesn’t want to let go of Bucky for one minute, but he risks taking one arm away so that he can pull out the cell phone Coulson gave him and press the number 1 until it dials. When someone picks up, he says, “We’re out of range. All clear,” then hangs up and tucks it away again.

Pressed into the crook of Steve’s neck, Bucky’s head turns slightly. “They’re gonna blow it up,” Steve says by way of explanation.

“Good,” Bucky grunts, low and thick but intelligible. Rubbing his forehead against Steve’s shoulder, he lets out a long, shuddering sigh.

Steve lifts one hand to cautiously touch the back of Bucky’s head, dropping it back between his shoulderblades when Bucky tenses. Shifting his feet a little further apart, he softens his knees so that Bucky doesn’t have to stretch up to hug him and isn’t that strange? That Bucky’s shorter than him by a few inches, even now.

“I remembered,” Bucky says into Steve’s shoulder. It’s clearly still a struggle for him to speak. “Forgetting. Them making me forget. They’d ask and I wouldn’t answer and it didn’t matter. They’d get it out anyway and when they asked me again I didn’t know. They took you away. They took everything away and put in something else.”

“Shh, hey. It’s still there. Maybe you forgot but it’s still all there, it didn’t stop existing. One way or another, we’ll get it back, Bucky, I promise.”

Bucky sags against him—then jerks as an almighty explosion shakes the earth around them. Turning, Steve’s just in time to watch the roof of the mansion go up in the air. They’re far enough away that they’re in no danger from the flying debris, but it’s still an impressive sight as each of the charges go off in a row, traveling from the roof to the ground and blowing the building apart like it was made of sand.

The blasts echo throughout the valley. A flock of startled birds flutters up from the trees to the south. Behind them, an owl hoots.

Steve looks at Bucky, who’s watching the villa go up in flames. “You survived them, y’know,” he murmurs. “Pierce is dead. Schmidt and Zola are dead. Breite is dead. They fought you, and you won.”

Bucky breathes out once, hard. “Doesn’t feel like I did.”

Steve presses close, until they’re fitted together from knees to shoulders, and kisses Bucky’s temple. “You’re alive and they’re not. I call that a win.”

Bucky leans against him, lets Steve tuck into his side as he watches the destruction of the place where he suffered so much. It’s strange to be this close to him and not feel afraid—of Bucky, of himself, of doing something wrong and making everything worse. Mostly of that last one. But there isn’t anything worse, Steve realizes. Steve may still be blind and in the dark, but he is not Zola or Schmidt or Breite or Pierce. There’s nothing more terrible than what Bucky has already come through, and somehow he has made it back to Steve anyway, wading through the ashes.

The owl hoots again, loud and directly overhead. Then Barton’s voice calls out, “Hate to interrupt the catharsis but we gotta get a move-on. Besides, cool guys don’t look at explosions.”

Steve looks up but sees nothing. Bucky doesn’t even twitch and when Steve catches his eye he merely shrugs and scrubs a hand over his face. “He’s okay. When I started...remembering too much, he threw rocks at me until I stopped. It helped,” he adds when Steve makes an incredulous expression.

“Well, if it helped. Here.” Steve detaches from Bucky’s side and swings one of the packs down from his shoulders.

Bucky takes it, jerking a chin at the Scotch. “What’s that for?”

“Um, not really sure. Agent Triplett, he was the black fellah, he gave it to me. I told him it was wasted on the two of us, but he insisted for some reason.” He hands that over, too, with a shrug.

Bucky frowns at the label—and then his expression slowly changes. His gaze goes faraway, but then it comes back around and, and he _grins_. His lips turn upward, his eyes light up, and he starts to _laugh_ , putting his head back. His hair’s pulled into a loose ponytail, shining reddish in the sun. Steve is frozen to the spot.

“Jesus Christ,” Bucky says, turning to look at the burning ruins of the villa with a grin still on his face. “I thought he looked familiar.”

“What?” Steve asks dumbly.

“Gabe Jones,” Bucky explains. He waggles the Scotch and it sloshes around the inside of the bottle.

Realization dawns. “That was his _son_?”

“Grandson, actually,” Barton puts in from the branches overhead. “You old farts.”

Wordlessly, Bucky turns and pitches the Scotch upward at Barton’s voice. 

It must find its mark, because Barton whoops. “Aw, sweet!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is much discussion of Bucky's reprogramming, including an audio recording of his memories being electrocuted out of him.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barton rides with them to Paris, stretched out in the backseat with his arms folded across his chest and his boots propped in the open window. If he’s not asleep then he’s doing a good job of pretending. Bucky still keeps his back to the dashboard of the car, turned around in the front seat to face the back.
> 
>  
> 
> Warning for some mild consent issues: both characters are fully consenting, but have to work through some mental issues during that scene, including one character being triggered (not related to sexual trauma). Brief discussion of potential self-harm. More details in the end notes.

Barton rides with them to Paris, stretched out in the backseat with his arms folded across his chest and his boots propped in the open window. If he’s not asleep then he’s doing a good job of pretending. Bucky still keeps his back to the dashboard of the car, turned around in the front seat to face the back.

The rifle’s too long to use at such close quarters, but so is the bow. They both keep their hands on their knives.

Steve drives them through the sunset, through the night, into the sunrise. Bucky drifts a little in his head, not that full-world tilt that pitches him like a ship caught in a tsunami wave, but the muted, static blankness that he sinks into whenever he’s waiting for something to happen, to arrive at the next strike point, for a target to appear in his scope. Occasionally he’ll rise up and every time he does it’s a strange thrill to glance over and find Steve in the driver’s seat, his eyes lined with dark circles but still fixed on the road.

In the morning Barton gets them across the border to France with minimal trouble. Bucky spends the approach to the checkpoint digging his fingernails into the flesh of his palms until they ooze blood, but Barton only leans out a window and gets them waved through by an impressively muscular woman who rolls her eyes but smiles when he blows her a kiss.

“Who was that?” Steve asks, ducking his head to catch Barton’s eye in the rearview mirror.

“Colette,” Barton says with a longing sigh as he resettles in the backseat. “She can bench 140 and she hand-makes tables in her spare time. God, I love French women.”

“Yeah? Think a lot of fellahs thought that during the war, too.”

He doesn’t glance over at Bucky as he says it but something in Steve’s voice sends Bucky poking through the haystack of memories that erupted out of his head at Breite’s villa. It grows in size every day, so tangled that the idea of trying to unravel it all overwhelms him. The best he can manage is to turn it this way and that, tug at a few misshapen sides in the hopes that something will—

Green eyes on a pale face. “Ava,” he says.

Steve looks at him, surprised and then...something else that Bucky can’t identify that makes Steve seem smaller than he is. “Yeah, that’s right. Your Free French gal. She was a code runner,” he adds for Barton’s benefit...and for Bucky’s, too. “We’d see her maybe once or twice a month but every time we did we knew it was time to batten down the hatches. Ava always had a big mission for us.”

Bucky tries to get a grip on the haystack—but it yields no more secrets, just green eyes and a sense of excited anticipation. “What happened to her?” he asks Steve. “After the war.”

Steve’s expression clouds. “She didn’t make it through. The Gestapo caught her on a run. I read that she pulled a grenade right as they were closing in, took a buncha them out with her.”

A silence falls over the car before Barton comments, “Well, if you gotta go...take a bunch of Nazis down with you.” He plucks the bottle of Scotch from where it’s propped against the side door, lifts it. “Here’s to Ava.”

“To Ava,” Steve murmurs, glancing sideways at Bucky. He still looks small. Bucky wishes to hell he knew why, but nothing in his head gives him any clues.

They drive another three hours to Paris. The closer they get, the louder the world becomes, until it’s a cacophony of car horns and air conditioning units, beeping pedestrian walk signs and people moving, talking, running, zipping past on rented bikes. Bucky has to turn around in his seat and the back of his neck itches where it’s vulnerable to Barton, but there’s too much else.

He tries to sink deeper into the Winter Soldier, that blank emptiness that suffocates but keeps him safe from the world and the world safe from him. (Until they gave him a target.) It’s not there, though: either the water has dried up or he’s gotten better at floating. Everything stays unbearably bright and loud. The haystack shifts and there are too many memories of Paris, old and new and in-between...it’s crumbled and dented by artillery fire, it’s dark and full of targets. It’s overwhelming.

He doesn’t realize that he’s reaching out until he gropes one of Steve’s hands straight off the steering wheel.

Steve lets him, dropping their joined hands to the space between the front seats.

Barton directs them into a residential area, winding up along a large park. There are children playing. Bucky closes his eyes, cringing—he doesn’t want to see any of the Winter Soldier’s memories about children, he doesn’t want to know—and beside him Steve murmurs, “Just a little further, Buck, hang on...”

The apartment is a narrow, two-story building on a stone street. The architecture in this part of town is old and full of arches; that, of all things, is what tips Bucky over the edge. It’s too much of old and new together, things that were and things that are, and the very air against his skin is suddenly painful.

Steve calls out to him as Bucky pulls his hand free and dives out of the car, but doesn’t pursue. Leaping up the stone stairs, Bucky lets the training that he’s held so rigidly in check for hours take over. His body moves the way he knows, lifting him swiftly upward, twisting and jackknifing, his metal fingers digging into brick and mortar to create handholds when there are none.

Cover. He needs cover. His heart is racing. It shouldn’t be— _the asset has no feelings_ —but it is and he needs to get _away_.

Reaching the rooftop, Bucky pauses, evaluating. The building is strategically well-situated, with a panoramic view of the surrounding area and enough distance from other structures to be defensible from lateral attacks. Small, almost invisible cameras line the edge of the roof, facing in every direction. The front overlooks the park and the streets beyond; the back has a space of maybe twenty feet between it and the next building. The apartment is an island, not obviously so but reassuring enough to the alarms ringing in his mind. A thick red chimney sprouts out of the northern edge of the roof and he tucks into its shadow gratefully.

The sun is out. A breeze stirs his hair. The sounds of the city are both amplified and muffled by the height of the building, but he is removed from it all, out of reach.

Below him, doors open and close. Barton must take the downstairs apartment, while Steve’s heavier tread moves through the upstairs.

It is a good building. Bucky leans against the chimney, bricks warmed in the sun, and breathes.

-o-

By the time Bucky comes back to himself the sun’s sinking into late afternoon. The roof has gotten hot, probably uncomfortably so to most people. Bucky, though, relishes the way it makes his skin prickle. He’s had enough of cold.

Moving to the far edge of the roof, he automatically scans the streets below. They’re clear in all directions; Steve has stowed their stolen vehicle inside the apartment’s garage. Around them, the city has quieted its pace from workday hours towards night and rest. If Bucky straddles the edge of the roof and leans out, he can see the top of the Eiffel Tower in the distance, hazy in the air pollution.

As the Winter Soldier he never paid much attention to monuments but Bucky thinks he can remember coming here before then— _furlough_ , his mind provides at random. It’s started doing that more and more, spitting out scattershot memories and making strange, often useless connections. He came here on furlough a few times, during the war. As Sergeant Barnes, bright eyed soldier and friend, and again later after Zola first had him, when he’d become something in between soldier and Soldier. _The procedure has already begun._

A sharp wind tilts his balance and he sits back before it can push him too far. Briefly Bucky imagines what would happen if he did go over the edge headfirst. It’s not a serious contemplation, just something he did even before Hydra: idle thoughts about the aftermath of a landmine, or how long it would take for him to bleed out from a stab wound.

That darkness had always existed in him, he thinks. Hydra had just made it bigger, darker, colder.

At this height, the fall wouldn’t kill him, but he could find a bigger building...except then he imagines Steve finding his broken body afterwards. Steve blaming himself, Steve with no one to watch his back.

Swinging over the side of the roof, he drops to the small window ledge below. A soft alarm chimes once in the apartment as he enters. Bucky stills.

An intercom in the hallway clicks on. “That you, Barnes?” Barton’s voice asks.

Moving quickly on silent feet, Bucky passes through a non-descript but comfortable bedroom and out into the hallway. There are two stairwells, one to the front and a smaller to the back. The topography of the house suggests a large, two-story panic room built at its core. Bucky would guess that Barton is inside.

The intercom is still live, so he asks, “What would you do if it wasn’t me?”

“Probably come upstairs with a couple of explosive arrows and leave an apology post-it for Coulson in the ruins. If you’re looking for Cap, I think he’s in the front bedroom.”

Across the hall is another nondescript bedroom, where Steve has pulled the mattress off the bed onto the floor and is currently sleeping on it in a nest of pillows and blankets.

Bucky’s first reaction is an unexpected but familiar burst of exasperation, irritation, and affection. His second brings him through the doorway, close enough to see the rise and fall of Steve’s shoulders as he breathes. The windows of this room looks out into tree branches—thick enough to obscure lines of sight from the neighboring building, but not enough to hide a tactical approach—and they cast moving, flickering shadows across Steve’s still form. He’s stripped down to an undershirt, boxers, and socks. He looks like he got as far as pulling the mattress off the bed and fell asleep in the act of rearranging the bedding on the floor.

Bucky looks down at him and thinks—

_The man on the bridge is deadweight, slack and dangling from the harness. The asset heaves him along by one strap, trudging towards the shore._

_The asset needs proof. A long fall into water is unsatisfactory. An identifiable body is the only acceptable outcome for its mission._

_Reaching their destination, the asset drops its target in the muddy grass. The man is breathing, slow gasping chokes that push water out and oxygen in. The multiple bullet wounds still ooze blood turned clear by the water, but the flow is already lessening. He will live, if allowed to._

_The asset crouches over the man, straddling his prone body, and—and it reaches for the target’s throat and—and it—_

_The man’s face is swollen from the asset’s fist, his features distorted. The asset looks at him and thinks,_ I know I know I know him. _But this is inaccurate. It does not know the man’s name—only his alias had been provided in the mission files, an irregularity—and cannot remember any time when they had—cannot remember—_

_Memory does not matter, it is nothing, it is not important. Only the mission matters. The metal hand is on the target’s throat. It does not feel much but it can pick up the sensation of a swallow, of gargling and a congested cough._

_Weak lungs. He always had such weak—_

_Steve—_

_He—_

_It is in place, poised to complete its mission, the mission is the only thing that matters, there is nothing else, it is not important...and the asset cannot. It sinks to its knees over the man and drops its head to his heaving chest. He always had such weak lungs, so many nights spent listening and breathing deep like that could help. The asset is making sounds when it should not; it is silent, it does not speak unless instructed to, but it cannot stop the thin noises that escape its mouth with every deep breath it takes._

_Its hand is on the target’s throat. The man’s skin is warm. It should not be able to feel that but it does. This is another irregularity. The asset moves its other hand, the weaker one, up to touch the man’s skin. His cheek._

_He is warm. Despite the river and his gasping breath, he is—_

Please keep breathing Stevie, c’mon—

_The asset does not feel. Its hand is on the target’s throat. Only the mission is important._

I love you, _it thinks. The words have no origin, no precedent. They are not—_

I love I love I love you, _it thinks._

Steve breathes deep and slow. He’s showered and shaved while Bucky was up on the roof. When Bucky drifts forward to crouch at the edge of the mattress, he can smell soap and clean skin. The thin undershirt rides up off the cut of Steve's narrow hips.

Past the line of his boxers, his legs stretch out long. It’s torture not to touch them, run his palm from knee to hip, but—Steve needs to sleep. And it wouldn’t be right, Bucky thinks. If he ever touches Steve again he wants Steve awake and looking at Bucky like he wants him back, like he isn’t afraid.

Like he loves him. He’d said he did, before, back then, but he hasn’t said that he does now. Bucky wants the words desperately—but Steve needs to sleep.

He looks at Steve’s slack, vulnerable face, the curl of his shoulder, and the dark hairs on his toes. He mouths his own promise, _I love you_ , then settles in to wait for it to be returned.

 

\--------

 

Apparently the mattress loophole works. When morning dawns grey and soft, Bucky’s stretched out beside Steve, one hand curled around Steve’s upper arm and his hair spread across his face. Steve can’t tell if he’s actually sleeping, but he’s horizontal and his eyes are closed. Steve counts that as a win.

The moment Steve moves, Bucky’s eyes open, peering out at Steve from his hair. Steve smiles, sleep-foggy, and reaches behind him to pull the edge of the sheet over his chilled shoulders.

For a while neither of them says anything, letting the stillness of early morning stretch on as they study one another.

Steve lifts his hand, tucking Bucky’s hair behind one ear; Bucky wrinkles his nose as the tips tickle him. Steve’s smile deepens. Bucky looks at it, looks at him.

“We could stay here for a while if you want,” Steve finally says. He hates to disturb the peace but they do need to talk about what they’re going to do next.

They’ve run themselves ragged from Honduras to Morocco to Italy, Germany, here, and looking back Steve can’t help but wonder how much of that was really Bucky looking for answers from the remnants of Hydra and how much was the Winter Soldier trying to evade the remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D. Steve can’t even blame him for that, considering how closely intertwined the two wound up being.

Some of those remnants, though, are Steve’s friends, and have spent the last two months chasing him around the world, risking their lives to help him. Steve loves Bucky, but the life they had together in Brooklyn is gone now. In the meanwhile Steve’s started the process of building a new one and he finds now that he’s not so willing to leave it all behind, even for Bucky.

That means, though, finding a way to integrate Bucky into that life. Steve thinks—he hopes—that they’ve started to follow the threads of that already: he doesn’t pretend to understand how throwing apples and rocks and bottles of Scotch at each other had lead to Bucky trusting Clint enough to let him ride along, barely four feet away, for the 11-hour trip from Germany, but that’s closer than he’s let anyone else.

There’s still a long ways, though, from this quiet apartment and the tentative friendship—or at least the mutual non-violence—of someone like Clint who is situated to understand Bucky in ways even Steve probably can’t, and going back to Steve’s apartment in DC. For one thing he doesn’t even know if he has an apartment anymore. He was considered dead for a while. Maybe his landlord’s already sold off his stuff.

Some similar thoughts must be going through Bucky’s mind, because the skin around his eyes tightens. Steve touches his face again, gently tracing his cheekbone, and waits.

“What would you be doing right now?” Bucky asks. “If I hadn’t...taken you.”

“I’d be lookin’ for you,” Steve answers promptly.

“But what if it hadn’t been me they sent? What if I had never been there?”

“Well, then I’d actually be at the bottom of the Potomac.”

“ _Steve_.” Bucky pulls away, scowling, and rolls onto his back. “You know what I mean, dammit.”

“No, I honestly don’t. What, if you hadn’t been here and I’d found out about Hydra and taken down S.H.I.E.L.D some other way and actually lived through it?”

“Yes.” Bucky eyes him cautiously. “What would you be doing, right now?”

Steve mulls it over. “I dunno. I’d probably...try to find some way of being useful.”

“To who? The Army again? C.I.A?” Bucky’s expression is dark.

“Think I’d be done with acronyms,” Steve comments dryly. “And I already died once for the Army. So...I guess, there’s this group I’ve worked with before. You’ve already met some of them. We aren’t quite a team, not like the Commandoes, but we could be and I think we could do some good in the world.”

Steve doesn’t want to overplay his hand so he leaves it at that. Nature calls, anyhow, and he tiptoes down the hall to the bathroom. The rest of the building is quiet; Clint had taken the ground floor apartment even though Steve knew for a fact that a big part of him was itching to scale the roof right after Bucky. It’s another in a long line of things that makes Steve wonder how he meets these people, these wonderful, damaged, brave people who are willing to give more than they should.

Steve isn’t sure how their team would function without S.H.I.E.L.D in the background, but he’s willing to find out. He’s got some debts to pay and he intends to make good on them.

After pissing and washing his hands, he heads back to the bedroom to find Bucky still sprawled on the mattress on his back, his head turned to look out the window. One hand’s in his hair, rubbing idly at his skull. It’s a habit he’s picked up in the last couple of weeks; it usually leaves his already-messy hair looking like a tumbleweed.

Steve looks down at him and he sees Bucky at fourteen, stretched out on the floor with his hands propped behind his head, listening to a radio program. Bucky at sixteen, drunk for the first time and drooling into his own jacket, sleeping next to Steve’s bed because he didn’t want to catch a whooping from his ma. Bucky at twenty, bare-chested in a heatwave and snoring while Steve peeked through his eyelashes.

It’s instinct to push the desire away, tuck it down in that place where it both _exists_ and _doesn’t_ —Schrödinger’s infatuation: does Steve love Bucky if he never admits it even to himself?—but then he stops. Stops and takes out those thoughts. Looks at them.

Would it really be that bad? He’s found plenty of reasons to keep his hands to himself, and some of them he still thinks are legitimate. But...touch seems to calm Bucky down, as long as it comes from Steve. It would definitely be a comfort to Steve and okay, Steve is officially on board with this.

He sits back down on the mattress and says, “Hey Buck, c’mere a second.”

Dragging his hand out of his hair, Bucky sits up. Even if he hasn’t slept, he looks mussed and relaxed—well, more relaxed than when they’d crossed the border yesterday, which Steve can admit is not a very high bar. When Steve reaches out and touches one knuckle to his cheek, though, Bucky spooks a little. Steve switches to carefully pushing Bucky’s hair back from his face again, tucking one lock behind his ear. It’s almost to his shoulders. Steve frowns. He’s torn between wanting to cut it and wanting to run his fingers through it, smooth it down.

Bucky is staring at him. “Was that,” he says slowly, “are you...puttin’ moves on me?”

Steve flushes, takes his hand away. “No. Shut up.”

“That—yes you are. That was... _Stevie_. I don’t remember much but...‘c’mere a second’? I don’t think that was very good.”

“Shaddup, shaddup.” Steve hides his face in his hands. “You were the smooth one.”

“Hey.” Bucky leans in closer. Steve peels his fingers away from his face and is immediately arrested. Bucky has his head ducked down, a soft, teasing grin on his face. It’s another one of those flashes, those fleeting moments when Steve can see _him_ in there—the person Bucky used to be.

It doesn’t seem quite right or fair to hope for every glimpse. This Bucky, the one that exists here and now, is as much a whole, complete person—despite his scars, both physical and otherwise—as anyone that exists in Steve’s memory. It isn’t as though Steve is waiting around in the hopes that those two, Bucky-that-is and Bucky-that-was, somehow meet again.

Yet he’s still grateful for every familiar tilt of the head, for the teasing smirk curling the corners of Bucky’s lips right now. If only because he knows better how to react.

Reaching out, he curls his fingers in the collar of Bucky’s shirt and tugs. “C’mere a second,” he repeats doggedly, and doesn’t mind when Bucky grins into the kiss.

It begins chaste, sweet, and a little awkward. Steve’s done enough necking to get the basic hang of this, but there’s so much else to think about. How to avoid the landmines in Bucky’s memory being first on that list. Touching his neck and other vulnerable places usually gets a pretty strong, instinctive flinch, and Steve tries to keep all of his movements slow and fluid. That gets harder to remember, though, as Bucky breaks away from his mouth and presses kisses along Steve’s jaw.

Words fail him when it comes to this. Patriotic speeches, yeah, he can speak those from the heart, but asking someone to look at him and see something _desirable_ , after he spent so long as the opposite...except, maybe there’s another way. They’ve always communicated best with their bodies, with arms slung over shoulders and footsteps falling into sync. _I’m here, I’m with you._

This isn’t a mission or a battle, though, and Steve doesn’t know they’ll ever find their way back to the close friendship they had before...even if he wanted to. It’d never been wholly honest, they’d always held back and hidden things even from each other, and after the mountain of lies that Bucky has been fed by Hydra he needs some blank human truth.

Steve gives it to him, gingerly looping an arm around Bucky’s waist and tugging at his hip. He’s fantasized about this, especially after the serum. With the chorus girls he’d still been learning how to use his larger body, how not to smack his head on low doorframes and yank off doorknobs, and that had translated to being a lot more careful with his partners than was probably strictly necessary.

They’d laughed, told him they weren’t china, but he’d preferred the teasing to the chance that he’d mess up and hurt them.

As he’d learned how to use this body, though, he’d begun to wonder at possibilities. Of course by then the war had been in full swing and it had mattered a lot more that Steve could fire a SAW without a mount than maneuver himself in the sack; but that hadn’t stopped him from imagining different ways to use his strength. He does it now, lifting Bucky into his lap and pulling him flush against Steve’s body.

Except then Bucky goes rigid all over, his hands coming up to land on Steve’s shoulders like they’d been going for his throat and just barely managed to detour.

Steve pulls his head back, looks up into Bucky’s face. His eyes are open and a little round, not quite panicked. Bending his head, Steve kisses Bucky’s collarbone in apology. It’s the right one; ducking his head around Bucky’s chin, he kisses the left one too for good measure. Underneath Bucky’s skin and the shirt he’s wearing they don’t feel different, though Steve remembers from the schematics that the left is metal instead of bone.

Bucky’s still holding himself carefully, the way you would around a wild animal—except Steve’s pretty sure the animal Bucky’s trying not to spook is himself. “Are you still afraid you’re gonna hurt me?” he asks.

“Yes. I was _made_ to hurt you.”

“Whaddya mean?”

Bucky closes his eyes briefly, shakes his head, then seems to come to some decision or realization because he reaches out, his fingers curling over the cut of Steve’s trapezius and digging in hard. His gaze is sharp and steady.

“They sent me out to stand in the middle of a street,” he says, every word carefully enunciated, “and they gave me the biggest gun they could and they sent me after you even when I’d been compromised. They knew you’d hesitate. So this isn’t just me being scared, this is me looking at—they’re good at it. Hydra is _very_ good at killing people.”

“They missed both of us. A couple of times.”

“That’s not the fucking _point_ , you dumb—” Bucky cuts himself off and releases his fingers, which had been tightening just to the edge of pain, and yanks his hands away. They go behind him again, tucked to his back, and Steve tries real hard not to let the disappointment show on his face.

It must anyway, because Bucky grimaces, half snarl and half wince. “I can’t take the risk. Do you know what I’d do if I couldn’t get hold of it and I killed you? I’d shove that gun back in my mouth so fast—”

His voice rises. Steve’s starting to be able to see it now, how Bucky loses his grip. It’s only happened the few times but he thinks that maybe the cliff is always there, that Bucky is always clinging for dear life.

Stretching up, Steve stops his mouth with a kiss. He takes everything he can, everything he has and all that he’s learned, and pours it into kissing Bucky. All his love.

His lips part on their own, catching on Bucky’s, and then, oh, Bucky’s tongue is against his, soft and flickering. He thinks...maybe he understands the French style better, now. For once Bucky’s the hesitant one, still struggling with himself, and that makes it easier for Steve to be bold, to fill the spaces with himself and his body.

He kisses Bucky thoroughly then kisses him again and keeps coming back, breathing in the smell of his skin and listening to him pant, until Bucky begins to respond. His arms come from behind his back to wrap tight around Steve’s neck. He kisses back in fierce, bruising bites that slowly gentle; Steve can almost feel Bucky pushing back from that internal ledge, settling more firmly against Steve’s body.

Finally peeling himself away, Steve waits for Bucky’s eyes to catch his before he says in a hoarse voice, “You hesitated, too. Then you pulled me out of a river. You can play that off all you want, but at the end of the day I’m alive because of you, Bucky. They were wrong about you. They thought you’d kill me, and you wouldn’t even just walk away and let me drown. Maybe you’re right and they had me nailed...but they didn’t count on you.”

Bucky’s eyes move over his face, constantly shifting to his eyes—only ever for a few seconds, like he isn’t physically capable of more—and away again. His expression’s tense, bordering on uncomfortable, and when Steve tilts his head back slightly Bucky ducks down, shutting his eyes like a diver slipping back underwater. Steve lets him, wrapping his arms around Bucky until his fingertips meet his own elbows.

The fact that he can do so, that Steve’s reach is that long and Bucky’s body that lean, makes a tangle of worry, affection, and fierce protectiveness settle around his heart.

Bucky’s face is still drawn but he keeps leaning in, sucking on Steve’s now swollen lower lip and scraping it gently with his teeth in a way that has Steve groaning, his hips tightening up despite himself. It’s not quite a thrust but it still makes him flush all over, a sweat breaking out in the small of his back. Bucky’s legs have eased open until his knees rest on either side of Steve’s hips and Steve can’t help where his mind goes.

Turns out he’s not the only one.

“Steve,” Bucky gasps, “I want—I want you t’fuck me.”

“Oh Jesus.” Steve bows his head and shuts his eyes, tries to breathe deep.

“I like it,” Bucky murmurs in his ear. “It feels good to touch myself there.”

Swallowing, Steve lifts his head. The sight of Bucky, flushed and dark-eyed, is enough to send whatever blood Steve still had in his head rushing downward to pool in his cock. But... “I don’t know how,” he admits.

Bucky’s face softens. “Okay,” he says. “It’s okay. I do.”

“You—did they—when you were in, did Hydra make you—” Steve can’t bring himself to finish.

“No.” Bucky frowns, his gaze dropping to Steve’s chest. “I...don’t think so. I think...I did it before them.”

“Back then? In Brooklyn?”

“Yeah. During the war, too. Maybe even more then, y’know, guys missing their girls and all.” By now Bucky has cottoned on to Steve’s surprise and is watching his face with curiosity.

“I never knew that.”

“Yeah, well.” Bucky shrugs. “Like you said. It wasn’t something that you told people back then.”

You could have told me, Steve thinks but doesn’t say. After all, when Bucky had asked him point-blank he’d lied without even meaning to. It unsettles him to think that there was ever a part of Bucky he hadn’t known, that his own memories have gaps—but there’s a bit of relief, too. They’re both jumbled up in their own ways. Steve doesn’t always have to be the strong one.

Boldly—he thinks, for him—he slides his hands down Bucky’s back to his ass, digging into the cheeks a little with his fingertips. Bucky’s mouth pops open and then it’s attacking Steve’s again, though now it’s less of _an_ attack and more like he just can’t help himself.

They resume kissing, hands moving with a newfound purpose. Steve keeps filling his palms with Bucky’s ass, his thighs, his sharp shoulderblades. Moving with a far more clear goal in mind, Bucky gets his right hand under the back of Steve’s undershirt and pulls it up and over his head, grinning when Steve resists taking his hands away and returns them the instant the shirt has disappeared somewhere on the bedroom floor.

Bucky’s trembling a little. Frowning, Steve bumps their foreheads together. “You okay?”

Tucking his forehead against Steve’s neck for a moment, Bucky lets out a long, gusting breath. “I’ve dreamed about this. It gets...confusing. I keep thinking that we’ve done it before—but we really haven’t, have we?”

“No. What makes you so sure now?”

Straightening, Bucky runs his eyes over Steve’s face. “I’d remember this,” he whispers, almost reverential.

And then—then Bucky is ducking his head and— _God Almighty_. Steve’s head drops back on an open-mouthed and embarrassingly loud moan as Bucky latches onto one of his nipples with teeth and tongue and lips. He circles it before flicking the tip of his tongue across the peak and Steve’s hips jerk up, hard and involuntary.

Bucky pulls back, blowing gently on the wet skin before moving to the other nipple. If that goes on much longer, Steve doesn’t think he’ll last long enough to—do what Bucky said he wanted. Towards that direction, Steve twists and swings Bucky down onto the mattress.

Halfway through the motion he knows it’s the wrong thing to do and is already catching himself with one hand, apologies on his lips, when Bucky’s fist clocks him in the jaw.

It’s the left one, so Steve gets knocked sideways and sees stars. He pulls back, shaking his head and trying to brace for any followup. It doesn’t come. Instead Bucky says, “Shit, shit, fuck, goddammit—” before the English fractures into Russian profanity.

“It’s okay,” Steve says, recovering from the stun. He feels the mattress dip and flails out, grabbing Bucky by the wrist. It’s the human hand; his left arm is still free.

Bucky’s on his knees beside him, vibrating with misery and braced to run. Steve should probably let him go, but he has a feeling if he does he won’t see Bucky again until tomorrow, and then they’ll be right back here again. “It’s okay,” Steve repeats. “I shouldn’ta done that so fast.”

“So that means I get to punch you?” Bucky grits between his teeth. “You’re the only one who thinks it’s okay for me to hurt you and I’m not gonna—”

Steve yanks him, hard. Bucky falls to the mattress and arches immediately, bringing his knee up. It’s hard to tell if that’s Winter Soldier instinct, too, or Bucky trying to make a point. Either way, Steve blocks with his shoulder and throws his weight onto Bucky’s chest. The left fist swings again and Steve grabs it this time, forcing it above Bucky’s head until both his wrists are crossed and pinned to the pillows.

Bucky stares up at him, wild-eyed and back on the knife’s edge.

Swallowing, Steve holds on tight and shifts until he’s the one with his knees spread on the outside of Bucky’s hips. He doesn’t say that Bucky’s right, that Steve didn’t even try to find another way to stop Schmidt’s bombs from reaching their targets; that maybe if he had, Steve would have been around to look for Bucky’s body and, not finding that, keep hunting until he tracked them all the way to Russia. Maybe, maybe, Steve could have stopped all this before it started...but he didn’t.

Somewhere in his head, it’d been the only fair thing to do. Bucky had laid down his life; it had seemed only right that Steve do the same. Except that isn’t what had happened at all, and Steve had been so consumed by following Bucky into self-sacrifice that he hadn’t been around to save him from something far worse.

That’s all words, though. Instead he keeps his grip on Bucky’s wrists and bends his head, slowly, slowly, lets their breath mingle and whispers, “How ‘bout if I hold on right here, okay?”

Bucky narrows his eyes. He’s dangerously still, a solid weight of metal and man underneath Steve—but he doesn’t move except for his wrists, flexing slightly against Steve’s hold. Testing it. His chest heaves.

“Bucky? D’you want me to let—?”

“No. Just...gimme a minute.”

Oxygen rattles in and out of Bucky’s lungs. He yanks and Steve has to lock all the muscles in his fingers and arms to hold him in place; but Bucky’s wrists don’t move an inch. His eyes are closed and Steve bites his lip, anxious but holding on.

The tension doesn’t leave Bucky but his thigh nudges against the inside of Steve’s knee. “Get between my legs,” he says.

Steve flushes to the tips of his ears but does so, settling with his knees bent right up between Bucky’s thighs. It’s a strain to stay like this, kneeling and bent over with his hands on Bucky’s. Steve tightens his core and settles in.

After a minute Bucky murmurs, “Can you get my shirt off?”

Steve shifts his weight onto one knee. “Gonna need a hand for that.”

“If you—hold the left on top.”

Steve rearranges Bucky’s wrists so that the left one crosses over the right, pinning it down. If it really came down to it Bucky could get free easily, but something in his expression makes Steve think that he won’t try. Part of Steve really, really hopes that this isn’t something that Hydra taught him, but he thinks—he hopes—that Bucky knows better than to walk them someplace they shouldn’t.

Steve can trust him with that. He hopes.

He can trust Bucky to let Steve strip them both one-handed, to guide Steve’s spit-slicked fingers into him, show Steve the way he likes to be touched. Back at the Hydra mansion their positions had been reversed and Steve can’t say that he remembers much of it, so preoccupied with keeping Bucky from tumbling into the crack that had formed in his mind. This, though, is crystal clear, every detail sharp. Bucky, arching to get more and momentarily washed free of the need to look away from Steve’s eyes. The tight, hot clench of his body around Steve’s prodding fingers.

Maybe Steve should feel jealous or resentful for whatever secret liaisons Bucky had while Steve was in the dark, but all he can manage right now is a deep, profound gratitude that one of them knows what the hell he’s doing.

That doesn’t mean he hasn’t got hesitations, especially when Bucky moans, “Steve, Steve, I want you, come on.”

Steve licks the hollow of his throat, brushes the tip of his nose against the scarred skin around Bucky’s left shoulder. “I don’t have a rubber or anything.”

“A...Steve, come on, we both got the serum. We don’t gotta worry about that.”

Steve rests his forehead against Bucky’s chest and eases his fingers out until they’re circling Bucky’s rim, just petting him. The spit he used to ease his touch has mostly dried. “I was thinking more about the ‘or anything.’”

Bucky breathes out hard. “I can take it. I want you.”

Steve chews the inside of his lip then shifts back, loosening his hold on Bucky’s metal wrist slightly. “Turn over.” Bucky does, rising up onto his knees, then makes an unhappy noise when Steve lets go of his wrist. “Just hang on a second, okay?”

“What’re you—?” Bucky starts to twist his head then freezes as Steve slides down his body.

Stilling his own movements, Steve hovers with one hand curled around Bucky’s hip and the other stroking the downy hair that covers his ass. He presses a kiss to one dimple in his lower back. “Bucky? You want me to stop?”

“N-no,” Bucky answers immediately. “Steve. Are you seriously—?”

He cuts off on a loud, strangled noise as Steve ducks his head, spreading Bucky open with his fingers and pressing his tongue there. The USO girls, bless them, had shown him all the ways to have fun that couldn’t get someone pregnant; it had mostly involved mouths and fingers in places that Steve hadn’t even known they could go.

He’d been a combination of aroused and deeply embarrassed when one of them had done this to him. From the sounds that Bucky’s making into the mattress, he’s pretty much completely skipped out of any embarrassment and gone straight into deep, throaty pleasure. Steve smiles to himself and continues lapping at him, circling the tip of his tongue and occasionally dipping inside.

He keeps it up for longer than is probably necessary, until Bucky is squirming and choking, “Steve, Steve, c’mon, please, you gotta, _Steve_.”

Giving Bucky one last lick, Steve pushes up to his knees as well. The squirming agitation settles the moment Steve stretches out over Bucky’s back and gathers his wrists back together above his head. Steve can feel his heart racing in his cock, hypersensitive and twitching as he nudges it against Bucky’s entrance. “You gotta tell me if I hurt you,” he whispers hoarsely against the back of Bucky’s neck. “I don’t hurt you, you don’t hurt me, okay?”

“’Kay,” Bucky murmurs. “Deal.”

Pressing his open mouth against Bucky’s skin to seal the bargain, Steve pushes his hips forward with his left thumb hooked on Bucky’s rim to hold him open. It’s slow and tight and careful—too careful if the impatient way that Bucky pushes back against his weight is any indication. Steve nips his ear in retaliation and Bucky huffs a laugh.

Steve’s started to shake, though he doesn’t know if it’s from the strain of his position, the effort it takes not to just shove his hips forward, or just knowing that his body’s inside of Bucky’s, that they’re joined together. When he moves slow it’s not just for Bucky’s sake: everything’s right on the edge of too much and he has to pause every now and then to breathe and just calm the hell down.

It’s Bucky who arches his body, who sets a rhythm with the roll of his hips against Steve’s. That’s easier to follow: Steve falls into step gratefully, thrusting to meet him and relishing the groan it digs out of Bucky’s throat.

[ ](http://cindyfxx.tumblr.com/post/100874024432/inspired-by-beautiful-stucky-fic-revenant)

Bucky twists his right hand free from Steve’s grip and wraps his fingers around Steve’s wrist, a tangle of hands against the mattress. “Steve,” he croaks. “Tell me you got me.”

“I gotcha, Bucky.” Steve squeezes Bucky’s left wrist, hard. The metal’s thick and unyielding.

“Tell me you—tell me—”

“I’ve got you.” Steve’s close, his orgasm swelling up. Bucky beats him there, shoving his face into the mattress and groaning loud. Steve can _feel_ him come, spasms tightening his body around Steve’s cock until it wrings him out, too, sends him over the edge into blinding release.

His body moves on automatic, fucking Bucky in hard jerks, while Steve’s brain swims around in hormones and strange, disjointed thoughts about Bucky’s hair and holding hands with him and wishing that they were facing each other right now so they could kiss.

Maybe he says that aloud because Bucky grants that wish by arching and twisting his neck. It’s clumsy and not at all skilled, but Steve presses kiss after kiss against Bucky’s mouth and jaw, not at all minding the scrape of his stubble.

Satiated, Steve peels his fingers away from Bucky’s wrist and gingerly eases out of him. Bucky makes another unhappy noise but lets himself be pulled onto his side. They settle together, front to back, and breathe. Steve finds himself reaching out for small touches, tracing the metal plating of Bucky’s left arm or rubbing his thumb across one sharp hipbone.

When he slides his palm across Bucky’s stomach, low to his navel, he asks softly, “Was that good?”

Bucky huffs a laugh and rubs his cheek against Steve’s outstretched arm. “Yeah, it was good, Stevie.”

They’re both a mess but Steve doesn’t feel like getting up just yet and Bucky would probably stay right here regardless. Steve does manage to pinch a blanket between his toes, wincing as he pulls it up over their legs to their waists.

Outside in the hallway, an intercom clicks on. “So, just for the record,” Clint begins.

“Please tell me there aren’t any microphones in the rooms,” Steve says.

“There aren’t any microphones in the rooms,” Bucky murmurs.

“Dudes, I so do not need bugs to hear you guys. I’m sitting in a room surrounded by steel in all directions and I can still hear you.”

“Oh God,” Steve moans, pressing his face into Bucky’s hair.

“And I just wanna say, for the record, that while I’m happy for you both, this is so much worse than the time I walked in on my parents fucking. They at least had the excuse of being drunk at the time.”

“Why couldn’t you just stuff your ears and pretend not to hear?” Steve asks despairingly.

“Because _I’m_ drunk, or will be when this Scotch hits. I’ve put the surveillance feed on cruise control, it’ll sound the alarm if anything dicey pops up. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go rock back and forth in a corner until I pass out.”

The intercom clicks off to the sound of Bucky’s snickering. “Laugh it up,” Steve grumbles. “You don’t have to give him orders in the field.”

Bucky doesn’t even try to apologize, just sort of...wriggles around in Steve’s arms until he’s got Steve draped over him with Bucky’s arms wrapped around his shoulders and their legs tangled together. It’s probably as much skin contact as is humanly possible for two people to have.

Steve snorts. Their heads are close on the same pillow and Bucky nudges Steve’s cheek with his nose. “What?”

“You’d do this with dames. I mean, not this—though maybe this, too. You couldn’t get away with as much in public as you can these days, you should see some of the—anyway. Whatever you could get by with the gals you went with, you would. And you were always...grabbing me around the shoulders and hugging me and—”

He pauses. Bucky’s watching him. “Getting away with as much as I could?” he finishes, quiet.

“Yeah,” Steve says. He smiles, lopsided. “Guess I was kinda dumb, huh?”

Bucky makes a noncommittal little _hm_ noise and wriggles again, seemingly just for the purpose of rubbing himself against Steve like a cat. A big, naked, gorgeous cat. Steve’s never had opportunity to test his body’s refractory period, but he has a feeling he might pretty soon.

They idle for a while. Steve rubs some of Bucky’s hair between his fingers. Bucky heaves a sigh that doesn’t seem at all hampered by the weight of Steve on top of him.

“Bucky,” Steve whispers. “You’re not gonna try to hurt yourself again, are you?”

For a long moment Bucky doesn’t respond. His eyes are closed and Steve watches his eyelids.

Finally he says, “I’m not gonna make a promise, Steve. There are plenty of things worse’n dying and if I see them comin’ I’m not sticking around. Not even for you.”

Swallowing, Steve nods and privately resolves to always, always stand between Bucky and whatever’s coming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Bucky have a sexual encounter that they both enthusiastically consent to, but Bucky's conditioning gets triggered and he becomes violent midway through. He immediately apologizes and consents to having Steve hold down his wrists for the remainder of their encounter.
> 
> Steve asks Bucky about his suicidal ideation and Bucky is non-committal.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They do eventually leave the bedroom, but only because Steve’s hungry and insists that Bucky should be, too.
> 
> (Sorry for skipping a week, I had family in town.)
> 
> This chapter contains discussion of past sexual exploitation of underaged victims, triggering, mind control, suicide attempt, and suicidal thoughts. See notes at the end for more details.

They do eventually leave the bedroom, but only because Steve’s hungry and insists that Bucky should be, too.

Bucky still doesn’t notice the need for food most of the time, but he’s gotten to like eating. Steve makes crepes—“When in Rome,” Steve says with a shrug, which doesn’t make sense, they’re in Paris—and Bucky sits at the kitchen bar to watch. The smell of them cooking makes the memory of a face bob to the surface of his mind: a woman with thin brown hair and a sweet smile. _Ma._ But he isn’t ready, yet, to know that part of himself. He tucks her face away someplace safe and watches Steve whisk a couple of eggs into the batter.

Barton stumbles in a while later, looking like shit warmed over. He stops in the doorway and eyes them both suspiciously.

The back of Steve’s neck flushes red and Bucky knows firsthand, now, that under his thin t-shirt his chest has gone all pink, too. Too bad the bruises that Bucky left around his nipples faded so fast; they’d both liked those. “Mornin’, Clint. Crepes?” Steve says.

“Sure,” Barton replies, edging into the stool furthest from Bucky. The reflexiveness of his movement makes Bucky wonder if he’s really that concerned about Bucky or if Barton’s just cautious by nature. Both options please him, the former because it means that Bucky can be a little less wary about himself, and the latter because it means he can go on being wary about other people without anyone thinking that it’s too weird.

“Wouldn’ta figured you for the cooking type,” Barton comments as Steve deftly folds the edges of each crepe in on itself.

Steve snorts. “Not much of one, but somebody had to be. And it sure wasn’t gonna be this knucklehead,” he adds, pointing the spatula in Bucky’s direction.

“Hey,” Bucky says, though he has absolutely no evidence to back his protest. His memories of their life in Brooklyn are still nothing but fragments. He can remember whole days from the war they’d fought in, marching on blistered feet, the cold mud of a foxhole, and the steady beat of death—theirs ours theirs ours left right left right—but he can barely remember Steve as he was before the serum.

But then again, that would mean remembering a version of himself that had never known death. Never dealt it with his own hands. That, he thinks, will never come back. Intellectually he knows that he was a child once, and did childish things; but it’s not there, in his head. All he can remember is being a killer.

He’s sinking. With an effort Bucky refocuses on Steve standing at the stovetop, Steve pouring a dollop of preserves on top a pile of crepes, Steve sliding a plate in front of Bucky with a shy smile. Bucky wishes Steve would sit down next to him but restrains himself from saying so out loud. He lifts a forkful of crepes to his mouth, chews. The taste is new. Too sweet for him—he’s learned to like salt with his sugar—but some rare, instinctive etiquette tells him not to insult Steve’s cooking.

“I feel like I’d be betraying my generation of American males,” Barton says after devouring his first few crepes, “if I didn’t ask about my favorite Howling Commandos story.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Steve makes a plate for himself and eats it standing up on the opposite side of the kitchen bar.

“Slipping past the guard post in Hamburg. Did you guys _really_ dress up like women?” Steve puts his head back and laughs and Barton points with his fork. “’Cause no offense, Rogers, but you’re, what, six-three and four feet wide at the shoulders? I do not see anyone falling for that.”

Neither can Bucky, but his experience might be colored by what they spent last night doing. Steve takes a bite of his crepes, smiling as he chews. “Mostly I stayed in the car. The story was, we were singers heading to entertain the _Kriegsmarine_ boys—which was a nice way of saying we were all pretending to be working girls.”

Barton’s eyebrows rise. “Captain America dressed up like a female prostitute. They left that out of the school textbooks.”

A slyness creeps into Steve’s smile. “I’m guessing they left out a lotta things.”

“Yeah?” Barton leans forward, eager. “Like what?”

“Well,” Steve says, drawing the word out. “The plan was for us to drive up and for most of us to stay in the car—sitting down, so they’d not see how tall all these dames were. The most of us in the car only had on wigs and a little makeup then these big coats, ‘cause it was late in the fall.”

He pauses for another bite. He’s enjoying this, Bucky can tell. His voice has changed slightly, more Brooklyn drawl than usual. “But, we figured it wouldn’t work if _all_ of us stayed in the car. So a couple of us actually had to go talk to the guards, feed ‘em lines about how cold it was and did the rest of us really have to get out, we’d be too chilled to sing.”

“Who’d you get to—” Barton cuts off as Steve lifts one finger and points it in Bucky’s direction. “Seriously?”

Bucky pauses in his chewing, startled. He hadn’t exactly forgotten that he was a part of Steve’s famous commando squad, but it’s strange to imagine that people tell stories about him. The good kind of stories, anyway.

“Dress, pantyhose, wig, lipstick, the whole nine,” Steve says with relish. “Your Free French gal, she came along, too, and did all the talking. If you opened your mouth of course the gig’d be up, but after she was done dolling you up all you had to do was stand there and look pretty. And let me tell you,” he adds to Barton, “for one night only, he was the _prettiest_ dame that side of the ocean. Dugan couldn’t even be in the same room as him, he took one look and ran away to hide.”

Barton laughs, clapping his hands together once. Bucky looks back and forth between them, pleased by their laughter but not sure how to react. Instead he goes hunting for the memory: it was during the war, so maybe...but when he thinks of Hamburg and Steve and wigs, what he comes back with is—

“There were girls,” he says. “Real girls, I mean. Weren’t there?”

Immediately he regrets it, as the grin slips off Steve’s face. “Well, that was the less-funny part of the story. No, no,” he interrupts when Bucky tries to take back his words, “it’s still good. And I’m guessing that they left it out of the textbooks, too. See, Clint, right in the middle of the mission, Bucky went AWOL.

“Our target was the submarine pen on the river, but we’d barely got past the guard post when Bucky and Ava asked to be let out. Said they had something they needed to do and they’d meet us at the rendezvous point. Well, I didn’t know what the Hell to think, but I trusted Bucky. They slipped off into the streets and we went on with the mission.” His grin returns a little as his gaze goes faraway. “Lemme tell ya, nobody was more surprised than the Nazis when one of their biggest naval bases got taken out by a buncha fellahs in ladies’ wigs and makeup.

“We get to the rendezvous point and I’m just starting to worry...when up comes this herd of girls, with Ava at the front and Bucky bringing up the six. Not a one of ‘em was more’n seventeen. Apparently one of the guards at the post had mentioned a brothel thereabouts, full of girls the _Wehrmacht_ had kidnapped from Denmark and Poland.”

“Damn,” Clint says softly.

Steve nods, his lips pressed together. “And there the rest of us were, goin’ after submarines.”

Faces flashed through Bucky’s mind: tearful, bruised, frightened. Before, he’d have thought they were his victims. “Did we get them out?” he asks.

“Yeah. We had to steal a boat, a tank, and a small train to do it, but we got them to Allied territory.” He smiles again, except this time it’s soft and fond and his eyes are on Bucky’s face. “Trust you to remember that part of the story.”

Bucky’s not sure what Steve means by that, so he puts his head down over his food and resumes eating.

-o-

Steve stays downstairs talking to Clint for a while about people they both know, but Bucky escapes to their room. He is—and here his brain has to fight past the roadblock of _the asset does not_ —he is tired. Not physically: his body can go days without sleep or rest (he thinks, or has been made to believe), but mental endurance means something else.

It didn’t used to, but only because he didn’t exist mentally, as far as Hydra was concerned.

Now, though, there is so much to process. Memory and emotions and conversation, decisions, decisions, decisions. So many choices to make for himself. Whether he is hungry or not, what to eat, if he should smile in reaction or frown, if he feels— _the asset does not_ —safe or angry or sad.

So he goes upstairs, sits down on the bare mattress—Steve having bashfully stripped the sheets—and lets himself sink under for a few minutes.

_Be nothing. Don’t think._

It takes more effort than it used to. Used to? It’s only been a month and a half since DC. Only a few weeks ago he was slipping into the Winter Soldier every five seconds or tumbling through memories as deep as graves, and the struggle was to find his way back to the surface. The mansion had changed all that. Now he’s above, peering down into himself for answers or relief.

Neither come easily.

Instead he finds himself replaying the Hamburg story and all the other tidbits that Steve has shared with him. The man who’d knelt on the floor in front of Breite and let her unmake him hadn’t cared about little girls in a brothel; Bucky thinks that man would have done anything to make what was happening to him stop. He was the breaking point between who Bucky used to be and who he is now.

This isn’t working. He can’t stop thinking, can’t be nothing, so instead he grabs a knife and goes into the bathroom.

Steve comes upstairs a while later. He walks past the bathroom, glancing in, then stops and doubles back to stare at Bucky, who’s surrounded by ragged bits of his own hair. “Scissors would be easier, Buck.”

“I don’t,” Bucky says, scowling as the hair jerks at his scalp with every saw of the blade, “care if it looks good.”

“Who said anything about looks? You’d be a lot less likely to cut y’self, that’s all.”

A clump of hair comes away in Bucky’s hand. He stands for a moment, holding it and the knife, before he drops the hair to the floor and puts the knife down on the counter.

“I don’t want you to cut my hair,” he says.

“Okay.”

Bucky glances at the mirror and grimaces. His hair’s now noticeably lopsided, the left side about an inch longer than the right. “I don’t—care what it looks like, but I don’t want people to notice me because it’s strange. And it’s too damn long.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a tactical weakness. It gets in my eyes. Even if I put it back, someone could grab the tail in close combat.”

“Bucky,” Steve says gently, “you don’t have to cut your hair if you don’t want to.”

“I also don’t want to die because my damn hair is too long,” Bucky counters, stubborn. He fingers the hilt of the knife restlessly but doesn’t lift it again.

He does twitch when Steve moves forward. “Okay to touch you?” Steve asks, his hands hovering and waiting on Bucky’s jerky nod before they slide into the jagged strands on both sides of his head.

The sensation of Steve’s fingers sliding along his scalp quickly sends Bucky’s eyes to half-mast. He sways into the circle of strong arms, dimly aware of Steve’s hands gathering his hair into a tail on the back of his head and much more preoccupied with the way Steve smells and the heat his body gives off.

Steve’s breath—smelling strongly of coffee and crepes—brushes over Bucky’s face as he chuckles. “We should probably give Clint a break.”

Bucky hadn’t even been thinking about sex. That’s good, too, but simple physical contact—with Steve—is enough to make his brain soft and floaty. A lot of people have touched him over the last seventy years, struck and restrained and examined and operated on him; yet Bucky feels completely starved of this the way he never gets about food.

Steve scoops and tugs at Bucky’s hair to his satisfaction then lets it fall again and steps away. “You could cut this much,” he holds up his fingers in demonstration, “and still be able to put it back. The tail’d be too small to get a real good grip on it.”

“Yeah?” Bucky checks himself in the mirror again before lifting the knife. Instead of applying it to his hair again, though, he slips it into its sheath at his side. “Where’re these scissors, huh?”

Steve sits on the toilet seat to supervise, far enough away that Bucky can watch strands of hair float to the floor without slipping sideways into another place. It still happens a little but every time it does he drops his arms and spends a few minutes leaning against the wall, breathing in time to Steve’s inhales and exhales.

Eventually the tangled mess on his head takes some kind of shape: shorter across his forehead to keep the front out of his eyes but the rest hanging just past his jaw. Shaking out the loose ends, Bucky pulls it back and is pleased to feel only a short tail.

“Cute,” Steve murmurs. He laughs when Bucky pulls a face at him and tugs his shirt off over his head. “Cuter.”

“Yeah, yeah, get outta my way, ya mook.” The bathroom is narrow and Bucky makes a point of putting his elbow in Steve’s face as he slides the shower door open. Steve retaliates by pinching Bucky’s ass through his boxers then yelps when Bucky does the same to his nipple.

“Truce! Jeez, we’re gonna owe Clint another bottle before this is over.” Bucky shucks his boxers and tosses them at Steve’s retreating back as he exits the bathroom.

When he gets around to actually shampooing his head, the absence of hair feels strange. It’s a bit like waking up from the cold: each time he did, something basic had changed and his muscle memory needed to readapt. The guns, the clothes they put on him, the height of buildings...there’d always been a moment when what he thought should be there, what had been there only a few hours (days) ago—for him—was long gone.

It’d felt like a dream. He’d drifted through a decades-long day, watching as the world melted and shifted.

Now he runs his fingers back through his hair, tracing the new shortness, and thinks fiercely, _I did this, I chose to cut it this way, I cut my own hair and this is still real._

There’s a faint _zzt_ noise and his left arm suddenly goes limp, dropping down to his side and leaving a crack in the shower tile as it falls. Bucky blinks down at it, startled. He tries to move his fingers but they don’t respond. The whole arm hangs lifelessly.

“Steve,” Bucky calls, groping behind him to turn off the shower water. “Steve!”

“What?” Steve’s in the bathroom door when Bucky pushes out of the stall.

Bucky has to grab his left wrist in order to lift the whole arm. “It just went dead. It made an electrical noise and dropped.”

Steve frowns, surprised. “Do you think the water shorted it out?”

“I don’t know.” Bucky tries to turn the arm so that he can see the main access port on the side, but the wet metal slips out of his grip. He catches it again, gripping the wrist tight.

“Okay, okay,” Steve says soothingly. “I’ve still got the blueprints, let’s take a look, all right?”

Bucky lets Steve dry him and wrap a towel around his waist—he has to let him, he’s not sure he can manage the task one-handed. It brings back unpleasant memories of being touched while he’s helpless and he curls his good hand in the neck of Steve’s shirt, knuckles resting against his skin. Steve shoots him a quick, concerned look and smoothes his own fingers over Bucky’s human shoulder.

They go out to the bedroom they’re staying in. Steve begins to hunt through his pack for the blueprints. Bucky stands next to him, holding his metal wrist with his human hand like he can keep it from melting away. The numbness of it, the dead weight, feels strange and wrong. He chews his lip.

Feet thunder up the stairs and down the hall. By the time Clint shoulders the partially-closed door open, Bucky’s moved in front of Steve and fallen into a defensive stance.

Clint has his bow strapped to his back. He says, “Shit’s goin’ down. Put these on.”

He thrusts a pair of—earmuffs? A pair of earmuffs at Bucky, who backs away from them.

Steve asks, “Why? What’s happening?”

“Hydra’s making a move,” Barton explains, edging closer to Bucky as he speaks with the earmuffs still held out. “Backup’s on the way, but we should head to the safe. Barnes, put on the earmuffs.”

“They’re coming,” Bucky says. The words are a beat in his head. He’d known they would, but he’d let himself forget. Stupid. Stupid. He’d known better. _Kill or be killed_ —and he’d stopped killing.

Steve steps forward, clearly trying to put himself between them but only managing to make Bucky feel more crowded. “How many? Now? How do you know?”

“I don’t know, probably, and Coulson called.” Out in the hallway, the intercom starts to chime softly. “Shit, that’s the perimeter cameras. Barnes, put the fucking earmuffs on.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“ _I don’t know_ ,” Barton snaps. “They found something in the intel dump using the keyword you gave him, Project Revenant or whatever, but he couldn’t tell me over the phone.”

The chime in the hallway goes up in volume.

Steve and Barton are talking still to each other, their voices rising as well. Barton is holding out the earmuffs, between his body and Bucky’s. They are thin and plastic and black. The chime in the hallway changes pitch, goes high and piercing. Steve and Barton both cringe, lifting their hands toward their ears.

Bucky does not. He stands still, one wrist held in the other.

He knows what comes next.

The voice clicks on. Neither loud nor soft, steady and relentless. It is a recording, he knows it is, but he can still hear her voice, can remember being on his knees in front of her as she spoke the words to him, repeat them.

Repeat them.

It is there, in his brain, waiting. Waiting, all this time. It does not sleep. It does not eat. It does not feel, need, ask, beg, live, die.

It is. It is nothing.

“Bucky?”

It is. Repeat the words.

“ _Bucky?_ ”

He lifts his head. A man stands in front of him, his eyes wide and his hands open, unarmed.

He knows this man, he knows—but it is not important.

_Zzt_. The metal arm comes back online.

“Вы моя миссия,” the asset says.

 

\--------

 

Steve doesn’t resist being pulled into the panic room, but only because he’s pretty sure he’s got broken ribs. Clint’s about half a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter, but he heaves Steve in through the narrow door by what seems to be sheer force of will, and kicks the controls to shut it behind them.

It doesn’t close fast enough and Bucky looms in the closing gap, a gun trained on Steve. He fires.

Steve twists, taking the bullet in his arm rather than his neck. The door seals. “Shit,” Clint hisses. “Shit, shit, fuck, Cap.”

“I’m okay.” The bullet went through-and-through the meat of his upper arm. Steve grips the wound, applying pressure to both entry and exit. “Gimme...gimme a sitrep.”

Clint scrambles up to look at the row of monitors set into one wall. Steve rolls onto his side on the floor and struggles to get his breath back. Bucky had sucker-punched him right in the solar plexus and knocked the wind out of him before Clint managed to hit Bucky with some kind of taser. Maybe a cattle prod.

The recording is still playing and Steve knows enough Russian by now to catch its drift. _The asset does not feel hunger or thirst, the asset does not ask for pain to stop, the asset—_

“Shit,” Clint repeats. “Okay, this looks bad.”

Steve staggers to his feet and joins Clint at the monitors. The external cameras show three cars pulling up out front of the building, dispensing heavily-armed men in black fatigues. Steve counts fourteen, fifteen, and then looks for Bucky. He’s not anywhere on camera.

“We have to get Bucky in here,” he says, already turning.

“Whoa, whoa, hold up a second. That recording they piped into the intercom, it was some kind of brainwashing trigger, right? You bring him in here, he’ll kill us both to death.”

“I can’t just leave him out there alone!”

“We’re not, I mean, not for long. Look, Natasha and Other Bird Dude are on the way and Coulson’s called New York for backup. We just gotta hang tight ‘til they get here.”

“That isn’t—”

Steve cuts off as his eyes catch on the monitors. The Hydra agents have breached the front door and move into the ground level apartment. Their movement is tactical, slow and steady—until it’s fast and jerky instead, all of them lifting their weapons at a target.

Steve’s stomach bottoms out as Bucky appears in the front hallway, gun raised, naked, no defenses, facing them down. Clint is on his phone speaking rapidly to someone but Steve stupidly, helplessly reaches for the monitor like he can pull Bucky through to safety.

He’s expecting a hail of bullets, to see Bucky cut down in front of him—another fall, Bucky slipping away into the dark—but instead everything in the front hallway goes strangely still. Bucky has his sidearm—and where the hell did he even _get_ it?—trained on the Hydra agents, and they bristle with response from much larger weapons...but no one fires.

Instead there’s shifting at the back of the Hydra crowd and a tall thin man weaves his way through. He looks wary, uncertain, but he moves out ahead of the Hydra weapons towards Bucky. He’s speaking. The image is too fuzzy for Steve to tell what he’s saying.

Slowly, slowly, the gun lowers until it hangs limp from Bucky’s hand. The camera angle is on his back so Steve can’t see his expression—but he knows the cant of Bucky’s shoulders, the too-still way he’s holding himself. Like an animal afraid of moving wrong, waiting to be shown what to do in order to avoid punishment.

He turns to the door. It has a key pad lock. Clint is hanging up the phone, watching him warily.

On the monitors, the tall man approaches Bucky slowly, one hand still raised. Bucky’s head turns just slightly, tracking him. Other than that, he does not move. The gun is at his side.

Steve says, “Clint, open the door.”

“Cap, listen to me. They know this place is surveilled, S.H.I.E.L.D has multiple posts between here and the city limits that we _know_ are loyal. The only way that this makes any tactical sense is if they’re counting on you to do exactly what you want to do right now. Barnes isn’t the target, _you_ are.”

“So you want me to sit on my thumb and let them take him away again?”

“They’re not gonna get far and they know it. Once they figure out they can’t get in here and you’re not runnin’ out to get shot they’ll try to withdraw. Barnes is their only advantage right now, they’re not gonna hurt him physically, so just—”

Steve barely restrains himself from just grabbing Clint and _shaking_. All he can hear in his head is _I promised to be between you and them._

“It’s not _them_ I’m worried about!” he shouts. “If Loki came back and you knew he was—if you didn’t know that help was coming and you could only break free from him for one second, _wouldn’t you put a bullet in your own damn head_?”

For a long moment Clint stares at him in silence.

Then he hits redial on his small phone, waits until it picks up, and says, “So, we’re leavin’ the safe.”

 

\--------

 

He has a mission.

_It_. It has a mission. The asset does not use pronouns.

It shudders. It is crouched in an upper hallway in the blind spot of a camera, waiting. The target is near. Steve will come, Steve will—

It will kill Steve. That is the mission. Anything else is not important. All the solid ground that it’s gathered under itself, all of the shards that it’s stitched together, have been erased with nothing but words and the voice of a woman long since dead.

It shudders again then forces its body to still. The handlers took the gun away and gave it a knife. No other tactical gear. It is underprepared, underequipped, without proper backup—the handlers having remained in the lowest level of the building—but that does not matter. It has failed this mission before and it will not do so again.

Movement upstairs. It tenses, listening. Something thumps down the hallway overhead—a decoy, probably a household item. After a few moments of silence, the soft tread of feet follow the decoy’s path, heading for the rear staircase.

The asset listens to the two pairs of feet. It knows the way Steve walks, even when he’s moving tactically. If it had a gun it could shoot up through the floor but long-range weaponry was deemed not necessary for this mission. It will wait until Steve comes down the flight of narrow stairs and then it will cut his throat.

If it had a voice it would cry out a warning. But the asset does not speak unless instructed to.

 

\--------

 

“You worry about the Hydra agents, I’ll worry about Bucky.”

“All fifteen of them?” Clint whispers back. “Aw, gee, thanks.”

They’re tucked in the rear stairwell on the second floor. The structure of the building gives them narrow sightlines into the ground floor hallway, where the Hydra agents are holding position.

Bucky isn’t with them. Steve can’t help but wonder if Clint was wrong, if Bucky was the real target and they’re carting him back to headquarters right now to wipe away whatever is left in him.

He’s just drawing breath to speak—and then there’s a flicker of movement in his right peripheral vision.

Steve feels relieved for all of half a second and then he is fighting for his life.

Client yells something as they go barreling past him, Steve giving ground to take he and Bucky out of the line of fire and into an empty sitting room. “I’m good!” Steve shouts back, blocking a flurry of strikes. “Take care of the others!”

Bucky ignores this byplay and presses the advantage of surprise, lashing out with a knife. He’s still naked. His newly-shorn hair is damp from his shower. Barely half an hour ago Steve had pushed his fingers through it, helping Bucky decide how much to cut and how much to keep.

Out in the stairwell there’s a burst of gunfire as the Hydra agents zero in on Clint’s position. It quickly shifts and there’s the crash of glass.

Bucky ducks low, sweeping the blade up to gut Steve, who grabs a straight-backed desk chair with one hand and breaks it against Bucky’s metal shoulder. That leaves him a foot-long piece of wood in his hand and he uses it to parry the knife thrust that Bucky aims at his heart.

“Bucky,” he says desperately. “You gotta snap out of it, come on—”

A heel clips into his cheekbone. Bucky follows up the roundhouse kick with a stab that Steve twists sideways to avoid. Muscle instinct takes over and Steve uppercuts him with the piece of wood, snapping his head back. Steve cringes but doesn’t retreat.

Bucky barely seems to notice the blow or the blood that begins to leak from his mouth. His body language resets, switching from the speed of a sneak attack to a more cautious and defensive stance.

There’s a minor detonation downstairs, strong enough that it shakes the room around them. Clint’s brought out his explosive arrows. That does make Bucky flinch, his body turning toward the threat, and Steve takes the opening, tackling Bucky and sending them over the back of a couch.

If Bucky’s troubled by his nudity or even by his dearth of weapons, he doesn’t show it. This close, grappling for the knife across the couch onto the floor, Steve can see how his mouth is tight and his eyes are narrowed and hard. His whole body is a blur of violence, constantly twisting and driving at its goal as if it has no other reason for existing, when just yesterday he’d let Steve into him and shared with him as much as two bodies could.

“Come on, Bucky,” Steve pleads. He manages to get one hand wrapped around Bucky’s forearm, twisting the knife away so that he can lean in close. “You did it before, you can do it again.”

Bucky’s only reply is to flex his arm, struggling to break Steve’s grip. His flat gaze is fixed on Steve’s face but not his eyes. They’re too near to swing at one another and so they strain with muscles locked to get the upper hand, the knife between them.

Another explosion rocks the building, this one closer. Part of the wall near the door cracks from the force of the blast, sending plaster and wood splinters flying into the room. Steve rolls to cover Bucky, mindful of his bare skin. He can hear Clint shouting jeers and taunts, which seems stupidly reckless—until he realizes that Clint’s trying to draw attention away from Steve and Bucky.

It draws Steve’s attention as well, for a moment too long. When he looks back down, Bucky has twisted the knife around until the point is aimed at himself. His eyes rise, just a flicker of contact, but in them Steve can recognize the desperate plea.

“ _No_ ,” Steve shouts, shoving one hand over Bucky’s throat. The knife rakes the back of his fingers, cutting deep. A spasm crosses Bucky’s blank expression, a crack in the mask that twists his mouth, and he throws an elbow upwards. Steve blocks it before grabbing the metal hand in both of his and arching backwards, stripping the knife from Bucky’s grasp. It tumbles away across the floor to disappear underneath a bureau.

The action opens Steve up to a headbutt to the nose, which cracks loudly. Bucky rolls them sideways and gets a knee into Steve’s chest, right at his already-battered solar plexus. Steve sucks in a shallow breath and tucks up, planting both feet in Bucky’s chest and launching him away before kipping up to his feet.

Bucky beats him there and snarls as he lunges, the metal shoulder slamming into Steve’s collarbone.

 

\--------

 

They are both bleeding, asset and target. It and Steve.

In the tiny cracks between the drone of Breite’s voice and the beat of _you are my mission, the mission, nothing else matters but the mission_ is a scream of noise. It should not be there; the cracks should not exist, but the asset wasn’t wiped before this mission began and its mind is stuffed full.

It knows this man. Steve. Stevie. It knows the physical sensation of kissing this man, of being held close to the very body that it is now trying to destroy.

It can’t stop. The asset does not think, does not feel. The asset obeys commands at all times. The asset—

For a split second, it had fallen into a crack, a glitch, a heartbeat between thought and action when the scream had come tearing up out of him, _him_. Bucky. Then Steve had shouted and ripped the moment out of his hands. Frustrated anger had flooded into the crack before being swallowed up and suffocated. The asset does not feel.

It has lost its only weapon but that does not matter. Only the mission matters and the asset _is_ a living weapon.

It attacks the target with its body, steady and relentless. The target had given up fighting before and he may again. However, Steve has a slight size advantage and his clothes make him less vulnerable to shrapnel from the continued explosions happening throughout the building. They also make it easier to grasp him, and the asset employs a judo throw, throwing Steve across the room hard enough that his body leaves a crater in the wall.

Steve gets right back up, stubborn as always—except he hesitates, staring. “Bucky,” he says.

The asset’s cheeks are wet. It had believed the source of dampness to be coming from its hair, but now its vision blurs. Another crack opens up inside of it, gaping like a canyon and it falls, twisting helplessly.

Steve starts forward and the asset stumbles away, breath ragged and tears dripping from its jaw. “Don’t,” it says, cringing at its mistake. The asset does not speak unless— “Steve, get away.”

Whatever reply Steve would make is lost as a black-clad Hydra agent enters the door of the sitting room, weapon raised. He points the gun at Steve, who dodges backwards and flings a hand up to grab the muzzle, jerking it to point at the far side of the room just as it fires.

The asset moves automatically, leaping up to a flying kick—but the blow lands on the Hydra agent instead of the target. The agent bounces off the wall, stunned, and the asset catches him on the rebound, breaking his neck.

It stands over the fallen agent, staring down at it. Behind it in the room, Steve says, “Buck? You with me?”

The target will stop fighting. That was why—the asset remembers the first mission briefing and the tactical assessment of this target. It remembers the helicarrier, and blood on its metal fist. The target will not protect himself, and he will give up.

Anger suffocates the scream. Hooking a foot in the dead agent’s weapon, the asset sets the gun against its shoulder and turns.

Steve is already there, slamming into the asset and sending them both crashing backwards through a window.

 

\--------

 

It starts to rain.

Well, no, that’s inaccurate. It doesn’t _start_ anything: one moment it is not raining and the next, water pours from the sky and everything is soaked. Steve has time enough for a brief flicker of confusion before Bucky’s metal fist swings at his eye with a glass shard.

They are in the street, having landed on a car and both quickly scrambled to the pavement. Steve cringes as Bucky’s bare feet encounter the broken glass from the window they broke through, but Bucky didn’t seem to notice except to scoop up a larger piece to use as a weapon.

They dance their way down the street towards the front of the building, which looks as though a tank blew it off. The front rooms of the building are exposed like a little girl’s dollhouse. Clint is up on the second floor, leaning against a wall with blood soaking his left pant leg, still grimly pulling off shots at the Hydra agents who have retreated to take cover in the cars parked along the street. When Steve appears around the edge of the building, a few redirect their fire towards him, but those that do are quickly cut down by Clint’s arrows.

Bucky’s sobbing now, awful wracking heaves of breath with no words behind them. His movements have lost their focused brutality and become nothing but hard jerks of muscle, a puppet moving on strings. 

If Steve could spare the breath to speak, he’d tell Bucky that it’s okay, that Steve won’t leave him a body to mourn. That he’s going to keep on fighting to the bitter end, for both of their sakes.

And that Bucky better damn well do the same.

A sudden flash and crackle of electricity makes them both duck. All of the lights on the street go out together and from inside the house, the recording of the Russian voice cuts off.

An almost-instantaneous boom of thunder precedes a deep voice that shouts, “ _Captain!_ “

There’s a high-pitched singing noise, air traveling over metal. Steve knows that sound too well not to move on automatic, throwing out his left hand.

The shield hits his palm at the same time Thor lands on top of a Hydra agent who’d been trying to get a clear shot at Steve, driving him to the ground in a crunch. Swinging his hammer in an arc like a softball pitcher, he sends it flying into towards the remaining Hydra forces with a battle cry.

Bucky dodges sideways, momentarily spooked by Thor’s arrival, and Steve uses that moment to slip the shield into place on his forearm. By the time Bucky regains his footing, Steve’s ready for him.

 

\--------

 

The sound of the metal fist connecting with Steve’s shield is almost bell-like. It rings out again and again. The asset can’t find a way around that defense but it presses forward. There is nothing else.

By now the sound of fighting has faded around them. Most of the other Hydra agents have either fallen or fled, driven away by the blond man who dropped out of the sky. That man is something beyond the asset’s understanding: everything about him, from the armor he wears to the way he moves to the inexplicable thunderstorm centered around him, terrifies the asset.

That does not matter. The asset does not feel fear. And even if it does, that is not important. 

It can’t stop. It wants to, in all of the cracks where it is stuffed full of things that should’ve been wiped before the mission—the rattle of water in Steve’s lungs, an abandoned house in Tunisia, the taste of things that are both salty and sweet—but none of it matters. 

There’s a soft hiss and an arrow thunks into the asset’s left thigh. It grimaces, yanking out the shaft and tossing it aside. When it takes a step towards the target, though, the world starts to blur at the edges.

“Bucky!” Steve lunges forward, catching the asset as it crumples to the ground. It folds into him, still reaching, helpless not to, but its limbs have gone blessedly slack. It hopes, in the cracks that widen, that the poison works fast.

Except then it lifts its drooping eyes and sees Steve bloodied, agonized face above him.

“Steve—” the asset says between tight lips. _The asset does not speak unless—_

Swallowing, Steve tries to smile. It’s misshapen on his face, made wrong by all the bruises that the asset has put there.

“It’s okay.” Settling the asset’s upper body in his lap with one arm, Steve lifts the shield over their heads to cover them both from the slackening rain. “It’s okay, sweetheart, I love you. It’ll be okay.”

Steve is warm. The asset shouldn’t feel that, it’s not important to the mission, but the knowledge slips through the cracks. He curls into the warmth, shuddering again as a different kind of cold spreads through his body. It makes Bucky think of lights going out and ice spreading over his skin, and all the times that he went to sleep with the prayer, _please don’t let me wake up_.

“Don’t say that,” Steve begs. “C’mon, Buck. I don’t give up, you don’t give up, right?”

The asset’s metal hand rises. Steve doesn’t try to push it away or block it this time and its fingers brush against the side of his face, across his cheek before going slack and dropping to Bucky’s side. It’s nothing, it is a muscle spasm, it’s a dying ember. It is so fucking _tired_.

The muscles under his cheek shift and through the fog closing in on his mind, he can feel Steve’s lips brush against his ear. “I’ll be here when you wake up. I love you, Bucky.”

The world is going black and yet...and yet, from the depths of each individual crack in his mind there comes an answering whisper, _The asset loves, the asset loves, the asset loves_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Bucky tell a war story that involves Bucky liberating a group of underaged wartime sex slaves in Germany. Later, Bucky is triggered by a recording of Breite's voice into being mind-controlled again; Steve expresses fear to Clint that he'll try to kill himself to escape the mind control. While controlled, Bucky does indeed make an attempt to kill himself, and has suicidal thoughts.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint almost dies. A bullet nicked his femoral artery and he nearly bled out on the scene. Only a Thor-shaped ambulance and a mass transfusion save him, and even then he's in pretty bad shape. They have to leave him on Paris and Steve feels like the worst kind of traitor, but Thor vows to stay by his side and they need to get Bucky someplace secured.
> 
> (SO sorry that this chapter is late. :/)
> 
> Contains discussions of suicidal ideation and mind control. Also contains confinement. See notes at end for more details.

Clint almost dies. A bullet nicked his femoral artery and he nearly bled out on the scene. Only a Thor-shaped ambulance and a mass transfusion save him, and even then he's in pretty bad shape. They have to leave him on Paris and Steve feels like the worst kind of traitor, but Thor vows to stay by his side and they need to get Bucky someplace secured.

Stark sends a plane. Sam arrives in time to accompany Steve onto it, his face drawn and exhausted. He’s already spent the last week mopping up the Cottbus operation, but he stands guard over Steve and his unconscious charge in the flight across the Atlantic, while Natasha and Thor do the same with Clint in a Parisian hospital.

It's all a blur to Steve. They keep Bucky sedated for the flight and Steve hates the idea that this is how he's bringing Bucky home: slack and unresisting, his bruised eyelids closed.

He doesn't have much choice.

-o-

Five days later Steve rides the elevator of Stark’s renovated tower up to the main lab. It gleams so hard that his eyes hurt—not from cleanliness, there’s as many oil-strained rags and spare parts lying around the place as the garage Bucky had worked at, but it’s full of displays and video screens. Steve’s been to Time Square once—well, twice, but the time right after he’d woken up barely counted, he’d been too spooked to notice much—and Stark’s personal lab is like that: everything moving at once, noises from all directions, too many flashing lights.

He just has so much _stuff_. Howard had been the same way, always a new project on his mind; but like so many other things, the new millennium has taken that kind of personality and turned the dial up all the way.

Stark himself is seated at some kind of control array with three different computers around him that he’s ignoring in favor of floating holograms. Dr. Banner waves hello from a comfortable-looking sofa chair in the back of the room while Ms. Potts stands beside Stark’s chair, engaged in that quiet, rapid-fire not-arguing that they do all of the time.

For a moment Steve allows himself to feel irritated that neither of them has found Ms. Potts a chair, before he pushes that thought carefully away. If he said anything she’d probably be more insulted by that than by not having been brought a chair.

“The Eagle has landed,” Stark says. “You want some coffee, Cap?”

“No, thank you. Ms. Potts, Dr. Banner.”

“Uh-oh, Grandpa’s mad about something,” Stark comments to Ms. Potts, not even bothering to lower his voice to a stage whisper.

Steve takes a deep, controlled breath. “I want to talk to you about the security measures on Bucky’s suite.”

“Yeah, I heard about your little attempted prison break.”

“Oh, it’s a prison, now? Glad to have that confirmed.”

“We agreed he’d stay in the suite,” Stark tells him, not even bothering to look away from the holograms. “I distinctly remember all of us talking about it and agreeing that it’d be a good idea for him to stay—”

“I was _trying_ to take him across the damn _hallway_.” That alone had been a challenge: Bucky stood when pulled upright and walked when tugged but the thousand-yard stare he’s worn since he came out of sedation hadn’t flickered. Steve had hoped that seeing the New York skyline might change that.

The half-finished lounge across the hall from Bucky’s suite—formerly Dr. Banner’s room, but it’s been a while since his night terrors were bad enough for the Other Guy to make an appearance—had a panoramic view; Steve had stopped there himself more than once, on his way to visit Bucky.

They’d gotten as far as reaching the threshold of the suite—Steve leading, Bucky trailing after like a puppet—when the door had slammed shut and locked itself, almost taking Steve’s fingers off in the process. It had refused to open again until Maria Hill appeared with a security detail.

“He hasn’t done anything but stare at walls since got here, I’d hardly call him a threat.”

“Hey, Grandpa, if you don’t like the house rules, don’t bring home strays.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Steve snaps. “You were the best option I had, but if that’s how you’re going to treat him why not just give him a mission yourself? I’m sure you’ve got a cryo chamber around here someplace.”

“Let’s say a gun kills your parents,” Stark cuts in, his hands dancing through the air, brushing aside some pictures and selecting others too fast for Steve to catch. “Gun kills a whole lot of other innocent people. Gun is loaded and has a bunch of different triggers and you don’t know what any of them are or if the safety’s on. Do you like having that gun around you and your future wife and other people that you care about?”

He wheels to fix his chair and his gaze on Steve, who suddenly, sharply just _knows_ that Stark didn’t sleep at all last night. His retort dies on his lips.

“No,” Stark informs him heavily. “No, you don’t like it. You do it, because you know it’s not the gun that chose who got shot. You know the gun needs to be unloaded, maybe even partially dismantled if my scans of your buddy’s left arm are any indication. But right now he’s a loaded weapon—one that _killed my mom and dad_ —that can apparently go off if he listens to the wrong radio broadcast and he’s in the same building, let alone within a _thousand miles_ , of me and my future wife, who has adamantly refused to leave.”

Ms. Potts is on the other side of the chair from Steve with her knuckles resting against her mouth. Steve doesn’t think that he’s been in a room alone with her since he got here, and how did he not notice that?

“He _stays_ in the _fucking suite_ ,” Stark says then spins back to his floating blue images.

Ms. Potts catches Steve’s eye and smiles briefly, apologetic. He knows she’s changed, that something happened to her recently—there’d been a S.H.I.E.L.D briefing on the Mandarin—but Steve can also remember Bucky after the serum, pushing Steve to take a rest that Steve didn’t actually need anymore. “How is he?”

“The same. He’s still not talking, no eye contact. It’s like no one’s home” Righteous anger had carried Steve up here, and the collapse of it leaves him hollow. He slumps down into a chair. “We just got his memories back. It’s not...I can’t believe we’re starting all over, _again_.”

“You’re not,” Stark tells him without looking away from his floating computer. “Not with his memories, anyway.” Steve lifts his head to see some familiar cauliflower-shaped images appear in the air. “I had Jarvis scan Barnes’ brain. Not quite as detailed as an MRI, but close enough. No offense, buddy,” he adds.

“None taken, sir,” the invisible computer that lives in the ceiling and walls replies. Steve has found speakers and cameras in the corners of every room in the tower thus far, even his bedroom, though it’s never actually spoken to Steve or Bucky. Maybe it realizes that they’d probably react badly.

Rising, Steve moves to stand behind Stark’s chair, carefully to leave a few feet between he and Ms. Potts. From the sound of things she could roast him alive without breaking a sweat, but Steve doesn’t want to poke Stark’s neuroses more than he already has. “What’d you find in the scans?”

Stark slides the green cauliflowers—the same ones that Coulson showed him before, Steve realizes—to one side and brings up another scan that has an intense array of colors and actually moves on its own, like an animated film. “This is your buddy’s brain. This is your buddy’s brain on Hydra. This is—a cultural reference that’s lost on you. Nevermind.” Stark freezes the new scan’s animation and selects one of the older ones, bringing them side-by-side and zooming in. “Science bro, take it away.”

Dr. Banner, who’s been quietly sipping a tea while all of this went on, sets his mug down on the floor and shuffles forward, wiping his glasses off on his shirt along the way. “The human brain has different storage sites for different kinds of memories. Short-term or working memory is stored in the pre-frontal cortex at the front of the brain, here, where it can be manipulated and processed—we see or hear or taste things and make decisions about them.

“At the back of the brain is the cerebellum, that—I’m, I’m sorry, Tony, can you...” Stark obliges, turning the hovering brain scan to light up the base, which looks sort of like a big moth. Dr. Banner sends Steve a lopsided smile. “I’m not so good with the holograms. Anyways. The cerebellum stores muscle memory and coordinates things like balance or, say, how to fire a particular type of weapon.

“Then there’s the hippocampus.” Dr. Banner leans over the back of Tony’s chair, circling a pair of blobs in the center of the brain scan. They light up and he taps his finger against one of them thoughtfully. “For a long time scientists thought that all long-term memories were stored here. There was a famous case—sort of an awful one, too. Patient back in the 50’s had severe epilepsy, virtually untreatable. The doctors at the time decided the only option was to remove his entire hippocampus, which worked...in that it treated his epilepsy. It also gave him both anterograde and temporally-graded retrograde amnesia: he could no longer form new memories and lost a lot of his old ones, too.”

“Is that what they did to Bucky?”

“At first, yes. For years, the prevailing scientific belief has been that the hippocampus is the primary storage site for long-term memories. It’s only been in the last five years that the neuroscience community has discovered that it’s more of an interface for scattered storage sites located throughout the cerebrum in motor cortical circuits.”

Ms. Potts clears her throat. “I didn’t really catch any of that, Bruce.”

“Oh. Ah.” Dr. Banner glances at her then at Steve and visibly searches for words. “The hippocampus is more of a relay station—kind of like a communications tower for other outposts that actually store the information contained in our factual and autobiographical memories.”

Steve digests this. “So they took away his ability to access those memories, but not the memories themselves?”

“At first, as I said.” Gingerly Dr. Banner drags another one of Bucky’s brain scans out of the pile off to the side. Steve doesn’t need to be told that it shouldn’t look the way it does: it’s more full of holes than a school uniform in summertime. “It looks like our friends at Hydra were about fifty years ahead of the rest of the world in neuroscience.”

“It helps that they had human guinea pigs,” Stark comments. “And, you know, no morals or ethical oversight. Handy.”

Ms. Potts purses her mouth and glances at Steve, who clenches his jaw but doesn’t snap at the flippancy.

“Normally neural tissue is non-regenerative, but the serum—or whatever version of it your friend received—changed all that. This is Sergeant Barnes’ brainscan after they’d finished their neural redirectioning and this—” Dr. Banner taps the brightly-colored animation. It does nothing. He taps it again, then again, before Stark reaches out and does so for him. It springs to life, displaying sections of Bucky’s brain. “Ugh, thanks, Tony. As you can see, his synaptic regrowth is remarkable. It may take some time for the more...distant outposts to make contact with the relay tower, but I’d estimate that Sergeant Barnes has regained approximately forty percent of his long-term memory function.”

About half of the dark spots in the scan have filled in. Steve watches it, uncertain. “But then—why is he—the way he is, right now?”

The sigh that Dr. Banner makes doesn’t fill Steve with confidence, nor does the way he pulls his glasses off and folds them up. “Best guess? Mental conditioning. A lot of it. The phrase ‘revenant’ describes an animated corpse and that usage was definitely intentional. Memory erasure was never a purpose unto itself—they just wanted a blank canvas. Apparently the conditioning works even with his memories in place.”

Steve nods. His body feels slightly numb. He bends his knees ever so slightly, not enough that anyone can tell; in basic he’d had all kinds of tricks to get through the day without passing out cold on the training grounds. “So what do I do? How do I—undo this?”

“That’s...getting far out of my area of expertise,” Dr. Banner tells him and Steve has to turn, take a few steps away.

“Captain—Steve.” Ms. Potts is at his elbow. “I’m in touch with Agent Coulson and he has several recommendations for people who specialize in this kind of work. A lot of them blew into the wind after DC, and of course he has to double-check their allegiances, but he’s confident that he’ll find them. I’m confident he will, too.”

“Thanks,” Steve croaks, then clears his throat. “Thank you, Ms. Potts.”

He turns and strides back with his hand outstretched. Dr. Banner takes it with the same wincing, sidelong smile he’d worn when they first met. “We’ll keep looking for anything useful from our end, Captain.”

“Thank you, Dr. Banner. Thank you, Howard—shit, hell, Tony. I’m sorry.”

Stark’s expression is hard to decipher but he says, “No worries. Happens all the time.”

“Sorry, Ms. Potts, for the language,” Steve says, because he is sorry even if she isn’t insulted.

She makes little assuring small talk, smoothing things over and strategically moving them around the room until Stark is the one in the sofa chair, visibly wilting and sipping tea, Dr. Banner has gamely set to work at an actual keyboard, and Steve is letting himself be escorted to the elevator.

“Do you have any food preferences or dislikes?” Ms. Potts asks, tapping on her portable computer as she speaks. “I always think better after a good meal, personally.”

Steve struggles through the fuzz in his head enough to ask for eggs and maybe some Mexican. After a few taps she informs him that it’ll all be there soon. Steve wouldn’t be surprised if the delivery beats him back to the huge, horribly quiet apartment that Steve has been staying in, six floors down from Bucky’s secured room. A large number of his own personal effects have already found their way here. Steve has no idea how.

As the doors of the elevator slide shut, Steve just manages to catch Stark’s murmur of, “So does Agent need any funds? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure I’ve got a spare hundred million lying around—”

The elevator descends and Steve almost does, too, slumping against the wall.

 

\--------

 

Bucky wakes up in a strange place.

This is familiar.

At least _he_ can think of himself that way again without a mental cringe, the all-consuming burst of panic that fills him— _stop, don’t, fix it before they see_. He still can’t lie back down on the bed. 

It’s a nice bed, obviously expensive. If he’d been captured by Hydra there would be an empty cell and no clothes, if he’d been captured by anyone else there would be an empty cell and maybe some clothes.

Nonetheless, it is a cell.

He’d woken up on the bed wearing a pair of soft sweatpants and a t-shirt. They’re now stained with sweat; he thinks he has been here a week? Maybe two? Whenever someone enters the room—a short man in glasses who speaks in a low, soothing voice while he shines lights in Bucky’s eyes or takes his pulse, and a dark-haired woman with a straight back who comes in every other morning to assess whether he has tampered with his room’s security—Bucky fixes his eyes on the far wall and says nothing, does nothing, pretends that he is nothing.

He isn’t. In his mind he is whole and horribly alive.

All this time he’s thought that nothing could be worse than going back to the chair and having his fragmented memories scraped out of him. It had hurt and it’d left him helpless, easily turned to his masters’ will because why shouldn’t he? What else was there?

If he’d ever told the full, ugly truth to Steve, Bucky would have admitted that he’d never actually believed the things they told him about how he was a warrior for freedom and justice. The lies were just all he’d had.

Now he is full of memory. He remembers huddling next to a campfire in Belgium, Jacques cooking bean soup; he remembers the smell if not the sight of Brooklyn in the summertime; he remembers kissing Steve in a sunlit apartment with the cushions on the floor (except that had never actually happened, had it?).

And none of it fucking _matters_. In Paris he’d been full of memory, too, and love, and they’d still turned him off like a light bulb. The asset had been underneath all along, waiting for him, like everything else is a thin skin painted over emptiness.

He can’t let it happen again.

Whenever Steve comes into the room Bucky almost wishes that he could find that empty place on his own; but instead he is aware of every second ticking between them like a cut in his skin. It’s like he’s back on the floor of that building in Tunisia, staring at Steve across the room and aching, aching. He wants to reach out but he does not trust his own hands; he wants to speak but cannot bear to hear his own voice saying, ‘You are my mission’ again.

So instead he ruthlessly buries his love. He has to. He sits on the floor and silently wills Steve to leave again, to go away where he is safe and never come back.

Between the visits he roams the secured room. Besides the huge bed with its expensive sheets and huge, sloping headboard, it has a small table with two chairs, a private bathroom, and an empty closet that he can walk the length of in three strides. Usually Bucky sleeps in there, sitting up with his back to the wall, when he sleeps. His time with Steve has trained him to go down with the sun and he can’t seem to break the habit entirely.

There is nothing in this room that could kill him—no mirror in the bathroom, and the sheets would tear easily. Of course not: Steve will have warned them about that.

So he will have to be patient instead. He’ll have to play the part of the asset, that mindless and empty thing that has no love to give. It’ll take time. It’ll be horrible, to have Steve here and not reach out to comfort, for comfort. 

Of all people in the world, Bucky knows exactly how stubborn Steve can be, but even Steve’s determination must have its limits and some day he will give up. He will go away, back to his life, and he will be safe from Bucky for good.

-o-

Days pass. Bucky sleeps and wakes and eats the food given to him. If he thought he could escape that way, he’d stop eating; but he’s done that before, he thinks, and the memory of a tube down his throat, being _forced_ to go on living, is wretched enough that he doesn’t try.

-o-

When the door to his suite opens, Bucky is in the closet. He’d been dozing, swimming in and out of dreams in which he is running, running, but he jolts awake quickly. It’s night and no one ever visits him at night.

Footsteps enter the bedroom and pause for a long moment. A man, wearing boots. Armed. Bucky gets silently into a crouch, his metal hand clenched. He’s been half-expecting something like this: there are a lot of people in the world besides Hydra who want the Winter Soldier dead, and it was only a matter of time before one came knocking.

But this is what he wants, isn’t it? He can’t kill himself, but he could let whoever is out there right now kill him. That’d be an end. A swifter and more merciful one than months, maybe years, of pretending not to see Steve’s pale, broken face.

The man moves towards the closet, slow and cautious. Bucky can see him silhouetted in the doorway but can’t tell if he has a weapon out or if the man can see him. He stays crouched, two warring instincts locking him in place.

Then the overhead light switches on and he blinks.

“Y—you.”

“Are you actually sleeping in here?” Nick Fury asks, looking around the closet. “Well, that’s just sad.”

“I killed you,” Bucky exclaims, too startled to keep up his facade of the mindless asset.

“Not yet.” Fury steps back, gesturing outward. “On your feet, Sergeant. Let’s take a walk.”

-o-

It’s possible, Bucky thinks as he rides the elevator down at Nick Fury’s side, that this is also a dream. It has that surreal feeling to it, one that he’s very familiar with. He has woken up in different decades before; he’s still not sure that he didn’t sleep all the way through the 60’s. 

In comparison this is small peas.

In the lobby of the building they’re met by the dark-haired woman with the straight back. She and Fury exchange a wordless nod, like he isn’t wearing clothes that look like they came out of a donation bin.

Outside, the air is cold. It’s early morning, still dark enough that all the streetlights are on and traffic’s minimal. No one looks twice at a pair of shabbily-dressed men walking along the street, even if one of them is barefoot and the other one’s wearing sunglasses in the dark.

Neither of them say anything, Fury for his own internal reasons and Bucky because he’s trained to be still and silent in public spaces—but also because he is busy drinking in every detail around him.

This is, apparently, where he and Steve grew up. Well, not this part of the city, exactly, but somewhere nearby. Nothing looks especially familiar but the sounds—the accents of the few people they pass, the distant _thunk, thunk_ of train cars colliding, the call of seagulls—catch his ear, giving shape to something in his mind.

Fury leads him to a deli that, despite the CLOSED sign in the window, opens its door to them. The waitress, a middle-aged black woman with eyes still puffy with sleep, smiles at Fury. “Nicholas. The usual?”

“Thank you, Cynthia, yes, please.” Fury gestures to a small table tucked in an alcove that has sightlines to every exit and window then waits patiently while Bucky settles in the bench seat against the wall.

The waitress brings over two slices of pie, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. “Coffee?” she asks Bucky.

He stares at her then at Fury, who lifts his eyebrows. Bucky shakes his head mutely.

When she leaves again, Fury wastes no time digging into his pie. Bucky watches him eat, his hands curled tight in his lap. After a few bites, Fury points his fork. “You better not waste that, son. Best apple pie north of the Mason-Dixon Line.”

“What,” Bucky says heavily, “the fuck do you want.”

Setting his fork down and wiping his mouth with a napkin, Fury says, “I want to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative.”

“That—that’s the team Steve’s on, right? What, you want me to join?”

“ _Hell_ , no. Not ‘til after you’ve had some goddamned therapy.”

“Then _what_?”

With a sigh, Fury sits back in his chair. He’s moving stiffly, the only sign that Bucky’s bullets ever found their mark. “I’ve spent a lot of time and energy putting together a team of people who had the ability to fight things like Hydra, and worse. I broke multiple international laws, almost sacrificed one of my best men, and pissed off a lot of very powerful people to make it happen. And you,” he points one steady finger at Bucky, “you are _fucking it up_.”

“No, I’m not,” Bucky grits between his teeth. “I can. D’you wanna see that version? Pretty sure all it takes is a few words and then you’ll all see ‘fucked up.’”

A healthy degree of wariness crosses Fury’s expression, but he doesn’t move. “You think that you need a gun in your hand to do some damage? You don’t. You’ve got Steve Rogers.”

When Bucky makes no reply, Fury lifts one fist and begins counting off his fingers. “Billionaire genius in a flying rocket suit. Scientist genius who can level cities. Norse goddamned _god_ , controls the weather. World’s greatest marksman. Deadly assassin-spy. And who’s wound up in the leadership role of the team?” He sticks out the thumb of his other hand. “Some punk from the 1940’s who can run real fast and punch real hard.

“And don’t make that face at me,” he continues. Bucky doesn’t even know what face he was making. “He’s a helluva fighter and he’s the best man I know. But he’s the dead last one that I’d expect to be holding all of these crazy S.O.Bs together. People wanna follow that punk. I _need_ that punk alive and capable of leading.”

“Glad to know you care about him so much.”

“I don’t have the luxury of caring about one man, especially not right now. I care about _winning._ The way I see it—you complete your mission and kill Rogers, Hydra wins. You take yourself out, that kills Rogers and they still win. And you goddamned know it’ll kill him, one way or another.”

“Why do you think I haven’t done it?” Bucky hisses. He’s vaguely aware of pushing steadily against the floor with the soles of his bare feet, his legs tensed up, like he’s trying to shove backwards into the wall. The bench underneath him creaks.

“You wanna protect your precious team?” he demands of Fury, who shovels a large forkful into his mouth and chews impassively. “Lock me up and throw away the key.”

“You think Rogers is gonna let that fly?” Fury asks mildly then tenses when Bucky hits the table.

“You don’t fucking _get it_ ,” Bucky growls. “What the fuck else am I supposed to do? Apparently they can turn me off and on whenever they want, I can’t—I _won’t_ let them use me anymore!”

“So don’t.” Setting down his fork, Fury takes out a small notebook and a pen. He speaks as he writes. “Tomorrow morning—today—Agent Phil Coulson is going to contact Pepper Potts with a list of names and contact information. These,” he rips off a small piece of paper, slides it over to Bucky, “are the names on that list that I’d recommend. They’re good deprogrammers—”

Bucky cuts him off with an ugly laugh. “What, they’ll turn me into your puppet instead?”

Sighing, Fury sits back again. “You know, you’re probably the seventh or eighth person who’s sat across a table and asked me that. I suggest you get an answer from Romanoff or Barton. If I was the kind of man who liked having puppets, I’d have joined Alexander Pierce instead of killing him.”

Bucky twitches, his mind flittering. When Barton had shown him the tape of Pierce’s death he hadn’t recognized Fury, literally. They’d wiped him after the mission. Now the connections zing into place and he looks at Fury with a new sharpness.

Tossing his napkin and a twenty on the table, Fury rises. “We’ve lost a lot of people to Hydra. Good people. I’d like to avoid losing any more. The only way that Hydra doesn’t win here, right now, is if you let someone else back in that screwed-up head of yours and get it unscrewed. And that’s not gonna happen if you sit around all day playing dead. So I suggest you get the hell up, Sergeant, and get back in the fight.”

Fury leaves with a nod to Cynthia, who glances over at Bucky before she returns to unloading a dishwasher rack of mugs onto the shelves behind the counter.

Bucky breathes slowly in and out, relaxing his legs on the first exhale and his fists on the second. By now Steve and the others will have figured out that he’s gone—Fury must have done something to silence the tower’s surveillance systems, but someone will have noticed that he’s not in his cell.

Which means that he has a small and rapidly-disappearing window to figure out his next move.

He can’t go back to ‘playing dead’: even if he slipped out of the diner they’d probably retrace his steps and talk to Cynthia, who’s seen him interact with Fury and knows he isn’t an empty vessel. Which, he realizes with a twinge of irritation, was part of Fury’s purpose in bringing him here.

It was his one play, and Fury’s taken it from him. If Steve thinks that there’s any hope, even a flicker, he will dig his heels in and hang on.

He could leave. He could grab the shotgun that Cynthia’s got underneath the counter and take off into the city. Disappear. Go back to hunting Hydra. It’d be a mission, and something that would take him far, far away from Steve.

Steve would follow. He _has_. Bucky might have dragged him from the waters of the Potomac but everything beyond that was Steve choosing to stay with him through thick and thin. And the thin had gotten pretty damn thin: Bucky’s mind skitters around the memory of Ferrara. 

He could turn himself in to a government of one of the many countries where the Winter Soldier has been deployed. Let them lock him up. Hydra has many arms, though, and he doesn’t doubt that he’d wind up back in the chair one way or another.

He could grab the shotgun that Cynthia’s got underneath the counter and blow his own head off.

Steve...would follow. Not deliberately, Steve is a stronger man than him, but he would. Their lives are full of enough danger that they barely need to look for a shotgun. Bucky is not a good man—maybe he was, once—and some awful part of him wants to say that’s not a good enough reason. That Steve’s _life_ isn’t enough of a reason to live with this. 

But even in that cold, unfeeling place there’s a stubborn defiance. More than death or even love, he wants to know there is something in him that belongs to just _him_ , that is his own. 

He’d said, back in Paris, that he’d been made to hurt Steve, and he was right. His face had made Steve hesitate...but his body would have brought Steve to his knees. Even in his death, Hydra would profit. They would still be using him. They would win.

Bucky fiddles with the paper that Fury’s left for him, scraping the edge of it with his nail. Memory hasn’t changed anything. He’d thought that if he remembered what Hydra had done to him then he’d be able to undo it. Make himself human again.

He can’t. There’s too much. If he lets someone else try...he hates the idea, hates knowing that when they’re done there may be nothing left of him. But what other choice does he have?

His head swims. He shoves away the plate and puts his forehead down on the table.

Take away hope, take away love and anger, take away even the ability to give up, and what else is there? He broke, he thinks, all the way; if they go in and take out everything Hydra put into him, maybe...maybe there won’t be any _him_ left, and all of this will have been the act.

A carefully-constructed human-shaped thing that could pass for Bucky Barnes just enough to get close to Steve.

He shudders, squeezes his eyes shut. Distantly he can hear a few cars pass on the street outside, and the soft clink of silverware as Cynthia rolls place settings for the day.

And then the _thud-thud-thud_ of Steve’s feet, until they halt next to the table.

“Hey, Stevie,” Bucky says without lifting his head.

“You were—we couldn’t find you and I thought—”

The rawness in his voice makes Bucky look up. Steve’s pale except for his red, red eyes. Bucky’s reaching out before he even thinks about it, grabbing for Steve’s hand and pulling him down on the bench seat beside him.

It’s a tight fit. Steve’s knees bump against the small table, rattling the dishes. He looks away, swiping a quick hand under his eyes and nose, and his gaze lands on the empty dish, the paper. “Who was here?”

“Your ex-boss.”

Steve looks alarmed, even angry. “What’d he want?”

Part of Bucky wants to crumple up the paper, hide it. But that’ll leave the switches in his head. Even if they managed to wipe Hydra off the face of the planet, they’d still be there. “To give me a head shrink.”

Steve picks the paper up, squints at the three names listed there. “Seriously?” he asks, shooting Bucky a startled look. His voice has gone all nasal; he’s got snot under his nose again.

“Guess so.”

“Are you gonna do that?” And there it is: that awful shard of hope that Bucky was trying to crush, because he’d thought that was better than letting it cut them both up.

Is he gonna do that? He sets his teeth on the inside of his bottom lip and looks at the paper in Steve’s hand. What other choice does he have? If he doesn’t, then Hydra will do it for him: that thought cracks through his mind like a faultline, dividing two sides.

That’s the choice. He can either do this, or Hydra will always be able to use him however they want, dead or alive. He will always be their _asset_.

This, at least, would be his own decision. Even if it’s the last one he can make.

“If...if I wasn’t me anymore,” Bucky whispers. He can barely say it out loud. “If there was nothing really... _in_ there. You wouldn’t leave me alone like that, would you?”

Steve’s face blanches as if the thought physically hurts him and wraps an arm around Bucky’s shoulders. “Of course I wouldn’t.”

Bucky looks at the little slip of paper again. He has been here before: trapped, no way out except to let someone do what they want to his head. There’s a roar in his ears. It’s distant, still, but it’s there. He can’t help the reaction he has to it, the way his lungs seize and his hands spasm, pulling at chains that aren’t there.

“Buck. _Bucky_.” Steve’s other hand settles against his jaw, pulling his head around until they’re face-to-face.

Oxygen saws in and out of Bucky’s throat. Steve’s not dead this time. Steve’s right here. Steve didn’t come before, no rescue mission, but he’s here now.

“You won’t let them turn me into something else, right?” he croaks.

“No.” Steve lets go of his jaw and strokes through Bucky’s hair. It’s pretty greasy.

Bucky swallows. He draws in a deeper breath, wrestling with the thing that isn’t fear or anger or pain, is something beyond all of those things. “You won’t let me hurt you again, or anybody else. Promise.”

“I promise.” Steve’s expression hardens a little, turns stubborn. “You won’t hurt yourself. Promise.”

It’s a cage, a different kind of chain—but Bucky’s already baring his throat. Better to be tied to Steve than something else; Steve, he hopes, will love him no matter what he is. “Promise.”

Steve sags against him, tucking his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck like he’s locking the chain in place with his own breath. In the corner of his eye Bucky can see the notebook paper still—but he wants to just stay here a little longer with Steve before he goes to face the music. He leans against Steve’s shoulder.

Eventually it occurs to him that Steve’s in his pajamas and a pair of sandals.

“What?” Steve says in his ear when Bucky snickers.

“Nothing, we just make a helluva picture. Coupla scary-looking guys like us, snuggling in a diner.”

He half-expects Steve to flinch or even to pull away, but he doesn’t stir. “Times change, I guess.”

They do. They changed without Bucky knowing—but those times in between are a blank for Steve as well. So at least they’re here, together: a little lifeboat in the dark waters of a strange future, hanging on.

 

********

********

 

**EPILOGUE**

_two years later_

“ _Goddamned cocksucking sonofabitch!_ “

Steve draws up short, briefly ignoring the flickering array of flame-creatures that are creating havoc around 142nd street. The Hulk lumbers in past him with a roar while Steve asks, “Buck? You okay?”

“ _Yeah,_ “ Bucky growls over the comms in the way that suggests the opposite. “ _I gotta tap out, though._ “

That’s the signal they’ve worked out for when a memory reconnects. They’re unpredictable and Bucky’s reaction to them is as well. It’s only happened on the battlefield a couple of times but this was one of the no-buts, you-swear-on-your-ma’s-grave compromises that he and Steve had made when Bucky got tired of watching Steve go off to fight robot invasions or frost giants without him, and joined the team for real.

“Hawkeye, Falcon, expand your coverage to the bank. Bucky, are you—?”

“ _I’m fine, I’m fine, I’ll see you back at the Tower. Goddammit I hate my fucking—_ “

His comm clicks off. Steve takes a deep breath and refocuses on the fight.

-o-

He stays focused until the situation’s all but handled and then he tilts his head back and says, “Sam, can you—?”

Sam’s already swooping down to clip a line to Steve’s harness, lifting him up off the pavement into the sky. “Guessing you didn’t want Stark to offer again?”

Steve rolls his eyes. Last time this had happened he’d gotten a lift back to the Tower with Tony, who’d spent the entire “flight” making innuendos. Steve had almost thrown a punch and gotten himself dropped from a height that not even the serum could heal.

By now everyone had cottoned onto Bucky’s preferred method of dealing with unexpected ‘synaptic reconnections.’ Last month he’d abruptly remembered being de-thawed by Pierce for the first time and had crawled straight into Steve’s lap while Steve had been in the middle of a conversation with Ms. Potts about abstract art. The reactions of those present had varied from horror (Clint) to amusement (Natasha and, surprisingly, Bruce) to concern (Ms. Potts and Sam).

They still had no idea how Pierce connected with abstract art. Afterwards Bucky had been so unwilling to re-examine the memory that he couldn’t be sure what had triggered it to re-surface: the topic of conversation, the orange juice he’d been sipping, or the way the damn sunlight came in the window.

It would help his overall mental stability to identify triggers for future avoidance, but Steve has learned not to push. They do enough of that in their twice-a-week sessions with Dr. Yoshimoto, the psychological deprogrammer who Coulson had dug up in Australia. She’d started out working one-on-one with Bucky, while Thor sat right outside the door in case she dug too deep.

Of all of them, Thor is the only one who can reliably take Bucky down without hurting him or causing too much property damage. It’d happened a couple of times early on and ended when Thor had gotten Bucky on the ground and rested Mjolnir on his chest until he’d come back from wherever his mind had gone.

Thor had accepted this post with both gravity and ease, brushing aside Steve’s awkward gratitude with “It is no matter,” before taking a seat outside the door and opening up a snapchat with Ms. Foster.

Eventually the sessions had incorporated Steve as well, and that had been awful. Digging Hydra’s trigger phrases out of Bucky’s head had meant actually _using_ them, and it’d been agonizing to watch him disappear into the blank-eyed stranger who tensed at the sight of Steve’s face.

It’d been slightly—but only slightly—less agonizing to watch him dig his way out from underneath that rubble, rebuilding himself piece by piece.

But he does. And each time he does the climb gets easier. Steve fixes that fact in his mind.

The flight’s short enough that Steve can still hear distant sirens when they touch down on the balcony outside. He’d feel guiltier about leaving the scene if it weren’t for the distant—and growing more distant with each passing month—possibility that Bucky could launch into the kind of episode that would create a whole _new_ scene if Steve isn’t around.

Retracting the wings into his backpack, Sam asks, “You think you need backup?”

“Jeez, Sam, didn’t think you were that kind of guy,” Steve jokes weakly.

“Naw, but I’ve got sound-canceling earbuds and tunnel vision if I need them.” From the beginning Sam’s been pretty direct, which Steve appreciates. His only comment, _You’re not exactly the first guys to use sex as a coping mechanism_ , had been a balm of non-judgment. 

Steve knows a lot of messed-up people, but Sam isn’t one of them; if he’s okay with it, then maybe _it_ is okay.

“Think I’ve got it, thanks,” Steve says. Sam salutes him and hops back over the edge of the balcony, spreading his winds to catch the currents of the city.

The lights are on in the apartment that he and Bucky share. That means that Bucky had enough presence of mind when he came home to ask Jarvis to turn them up. Steve still makes plenty of noise coming into the apartment, dropping his gear and stripping off the top half of his uniform. “Buck?” he calls.

“Kitchen,” Bucky’s voice answers. Another good sign. Some pieces of the conditioning are harder to shake than others, and Steve has gotten used to Bucky turning periodically mute, tense with frustrated silence.

Steve finds him in the kitchen, violently spreading mustard over slices of bread. Before now, Steve wouldn’t have guessed that sandwich-making could _be_ violent, but Bucky manages with fast chops of the butter knife.

When Steve pauses in the doorway Bucky looks up at him—meeting his eye contact, good—and _laughs_. Which is—Steve doesn’t know if that’s good or not. “Bucky? You okay?”

“Yeah.” Bucky slaps the slice of bread in his hand on a messy tower of lunchmeat and cheese before leaning heavily on the counter and pinching the bridge of his nose. He laughs again, softer and wry, before scrubbing a hand over his face. “I made you a sandwich.”

“Thanks.” Steve moves to the cupboards. “Have you eaten?”

“No.” Bucky chews on his lower lip, watching as Steve takes out the ingredients for tea. They’ve experimented a lot with smells at Dr. Banner’s suggestion, and peppermint both tastes nice and is soothing to the nervous system.

“Are you hungry?”

Bucky heaves a sigh. “No. I’m not hungry, sleepy, thirsty, grumpy, sneezy, or any of the other dwarves.”

Steve smiles as he pours them both a mug of hot water out of the dispenser by the faucet. “Do you remember that movie?”

Bucky pauses, then says slowly, “Yeah. Yeah, I do. You went gaga about the art.”

“I couldn’t believe how lifelike Snow White’s gestures were.” The movie had come out right before the war started, when they’d both still been young enough to be dazzled by fairytales.

Bucky watches him, his eyes roving over Steve’s face. Steve plops the peppermint tea bags in their mugs before looking back. Bucky’s taken off his gear already and put on a tank top—Steve’s, from the way it hangs off his shoulders. His hair’s tied back; he’s been experimenting with colors lately and there are streaks of blue and gold mixed in the brown.

“I love you,” Bucky says.

It catches Steve by surprise. It’s so many things that Bucky has struggled with: the asset does not use pronouns, does not feel, does not make eye contact, does not speak unless instructed to, maybe a half-dozen other commands that they have yet to discover.

“I love you, too,” he says back, a little bewildered. “What’d you—”

Bucky makes a face and pushes into Steve’s personal space, settling against his chest and nudging his head against Steve’s jaw. “Naw, not yet. Let’s eat your sandwich.”

That night they make love with Steve on his back, his legs wrapped around Bucky’s hips and both their hands roaming. Steve slides his fingers over Bucky’s new arm—courtesy of Stark—and smiles when Bucky reacts to the touch, humming softly and reaching down to hitch Steve’s thighs tighter against him.

It’s not as desperate and frantic as Bucky sometimes gets, when it feels like the ship’s going down and Steve is the last life preserver on board; but Steve isn’t going to complain. After everything they’ve been through, they deserve to have some easy nights.

 

\--------

 

In the morning Steve makes coffee and brings it back to bed. Bucky’s still fighting with himself about the whole sleeping-in-a-bed thing, so he’d gotten up in the night to watch a movie and check all the locks and hidden weaponry.

Now he’s seated in the rumpled sheets, watching the skyline. The north side of their bedroom has floor-to-ceiling windows, something that had spooked Steve when they’d first moved in to their own apartment in the tower. The glass is nigh-impervious—Tony had proved this by hovering the Iron Man suit outside and firing multiple weapons at the window—but tell that to Steve’s vertigo.

Bucky has no such qualms. After spending so much time in an ice coffin, he loves being able to see the sky.

He accepts his coffee with a smile and drinks, inhaling as it mingles with the scent of both their bodies. He’s wearing a pair of Steve’s boxers and the same tank top from last night. The smell that lingers on the clothes helps keep him calm—something about the limbic system, Steve’s probably got a book somewhere that explains how that works.

Steve settles on the other side of the bed and takes a sip from his own mug. Waits.

Eventually Bucky sighs then stretches out to set his coffee on one of the shelves built into the headboard, which they’ve filled with books, weapons, and the essential oils diffusers Bruce gave them that are supposed to help with PTSD. 

They both have an official diagnosis, now: once Bucky had gotten his head halfway uncrewed, he’d insisted that Steve go to a head shrink, too. Steve had hidden it well from the others, but the poor guy had been halfway to a nervous breakdown.

Steve sets his mug on the bedside table while Bucky scrubs his hands over his face, trying to work out where to start. The whole thing’s so frigging ridiculous that he can’t help but laugh again.

“Should I be worried about the laughter?” Steve asks, a furrow appearing between his eyes. Bucky can’t blame him. It’s new, and new things tend to go wrong more often than right.

“Naw, just...alright. So you remember how they built the blueprint for the wipe they did on me?”

Steve immediately tenses. Bucky’s never listened to the tape that Coulson retrieved from the Hydra archives, but he can extrapolate a lot from Steve’s reaction every time it’s brought up. “Yeah.”

“Don’t look like that, it’s okay.” Bucky rises to his hands and knees and crawls closer until their legs touch. “The memory’s not bad this time, it’s alright.”

Usually Steve’s the one telling Bucky that, repeating it over and over again to dig him out from underneath whatever house has dropped on his head that day. This, Bucky smiling gently while offering reassurances, obviously catches him flatfooted. “Then what is it?”

“Every time they cleaned out a memory, they’d ask me all these questions about it to give them a roadmap and then—they’d turn on the juice, and they’d burn it right out. Afterwards, they’d ask me the same questions and it’d all just be _gone_.”

“Bucky,” Steve chokes.

“Shhh, shaddup, just listen. So that was 1960-something, right? After they were done, every wipe they did on me was based on _that_ blueprint. They never did another full mapping session like that and they never updated the questions, because why should they? The—I was working fine. Anytime I got unstable they’d just do another wipe and that’d fix the problem, for a while.”

“Don’t know how you’re so calm,” Steve says. He’s hunched up, curled around his own chest. His hands, resting on his knees, twitch like they want to reach out. He won’t, he’s so careful about initiating contact in moments like this.

“Steve. _Think_.What’d you tell me, when I asked why you never told me you were in love with me? You said that if you liked dames back then, then that was it, and either way you just didn’t _talk_ about it.”

Realization makes Steve go still. “They didn’t.”

“ _They didn’t_ ,” Bucky confirms, feeling a manic smile stretch his mouth again. “They asked me if there was a woman I loved. Those were their exact words. So I thought about Ava, they burned her out, and they thought that was that. They asked plenty about you, too, about growing up in Brooklyn together, they asked about fighting with you in Italy and Germany, they asked me about your _ma_ , but they _never asked me if I was queer for Captain America._ ”

“Jesus,” Steve breathes, dropping his head. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.” Bucky laughter bubbles up between his words, awful and wonderful. “That’s why this is what works—you and me. It was all that I had left in the whole damn world. They never caught it ‘cause you weren’t around, but once I saw you again...I didn’t know your name, I didn’t know _my_ name, but somewhere way down in my head I knew that I was in love with you.”

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Steve says into his chest. He looks pale but tilts his head when Bucky runs a hand through his hair. It feels good to touch so he does it again, petting Steve’s neck and bare shoulders.

Part of him thinks that he should be more upset. After all, he’s just discovered that both their lives had hinged on some Hydra scientists being narrow-minded, and that his entire identity is literally founded on the person sitting in front of him. Stark and Banner have done a lot of theorizing about the wipes and how they interact with his healing abilities. Most of it goes over Bucky’s head, but the one description that had stuck with him was of a tree, with a trunk turning into branches turning into stems turning into leaves. All of his memories, fluttering in the wind.

Hydra had tried to cut the tree down, but they’d never managed to kill it all the way. There’d always been a tiny shoot, a stump that sprouted upward again.

Now Bucky knows why.

“Breite knew,” he says.

Steve lifts his head, his eyes watery and so, so blue. “She did?”

Bucky nods. Dr. Marthe von der Breite has been a hated name in their apartment for a while now: they’ve long since caught up with her daughter, who spun a tale of imprisonment and blackmail, but that hadn’t changed what she’d done to Bucky. This, though... “I don’t know how she did. All our sessions were recorded so it wasn’t like either one of us could have said anything. But I knew she did.”

“And she never told them?”

“No. I don’t think she knew you were alive, so maybe she figured that it didn’t matter. Or she... I don’t know, she wanted to fight back in some stupid, tiny way. Even if you were gone and I’d never come out of the asset, there’d be something in me that they couldn’t get at.”

Bucky falls silent as he feels a now-familiar tickle in the back of his mind. He never knows what it’ll bring—blood on his hands or in his mouth, standing over a dead body or strapped to an operating table—but for once it’s not immediately horrible. Instead he remembers the smell of flowers and the feel of sunlight on his bare shoulders.

The garden. At the villa in Germany. He’s in the garden, standing next to Breite. They’re not alone, there’s a camera and some Hydra officers, but for once they’re a little removed. No microphones, no observation secretary, and a soft, fast whisper of, “Ты влюблен. Запомнить.”

Hands slip on either side of his face. “Hey.”

Everything snaps back into focus and Bucky draws in a breath, laughs on the exhale. “They never got it. Seventy years and they never broke me all the way. You were _in there_ the whole time...just because they never thought to look for you.”

“Well they were dumb,” Steve says and he’s still that stubborn little cuss, walking around in this big strong body. And of course, _of course_ they missed him. Folks had been writing Steve off since the beginning, dames turning up their noses and men sneering. They have both gone to operating tables and been made into famous weapons, heroes to one cause or another, but before all of that it’d just been the two of them, and back then nobody else had looked at Steve and seen someone they could love.

Bucky had, and that secret vein buried deep in his chest had been the thing to guide him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky thinks about committing suicide rather than let Hydra control him or ex-SHIELD operatives deprogram him. He is briefly held in Stark/Avengers Tower in order to keep him from hurting anyone or himself.


End file.
